Give ‘Em an Inch…

One thing you have to say about Northern climates – as soon as the vegetation can possibly get going, it does. Really, it’s encouraging. I mean, look at this. It’s mid-March in Ottawa. I suspect that thanks to the snowplow, I won’t see the garden under that pile until June unless I shovel it out.

The front lawn is still very much snow-covered, despite the influence of a few days of rain and relatively warm weather. But note how fast the snow has melted off close to the building.

Can you see near the arrow? There’s a bit of green. Look closer. There’s this.

And this.

And these.

My bulbs are coming up! The green ones are daffodils and the red ones are tulips! And I can see where the hyacinths are poking up a bit further on!

Spring is so exciting that way. I mean, maybe people in warm climates have it easier, but how would you get this thrill there? Every day something new will be happening now, and I love watching it, every year.

Revisiting Monty Python

On my last library run, I swung by the video section and picked up a couple things. One was an old Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers, “Shall We Dance”, and one was Monty Python live at the Hollywood Bowl. I was introduced to Monty Python back in college, and watched every one I could get my hands on during undergrad. I hadn’t seen any for a while though, so I wanted to revisit an old friend. Well, I remembered most of the sketches – the Silly Walks, and the Whizzo Chocolate Company, and ‘I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK’. For some reason though, this one had completely escaped my memory – how, I don’t know.

Unfortunately, the rhythm of my spinning wheel fits it very well. It’s been popping up in my head at intervals ever since.

Mental comment 1: The making love in a canoe thing? Makes a good joke, but I suspect it would be rather impractical IRL. Besides cramped space and benches, I can just see it being very easy to tip the canoe and then have to scramble to retrieve your clothes before they sink. And the lifejackets would get in the way.

Mental comment 2: The line '...just as sloshed as Schlegel.' was genius. Try saying it five times fast. Now think of what it would sound like if you were drinking.

A Family of Bookworms

I was down to my parent’s place this past weekend, as the cat and I both like to have a visit to the country every couple of weeks, catch up on what’s new and interesting. My parents are currently redoing the TV room, which also includes the computer, games, puzzles and books. That is, the part of the books that is not my personal collection, or the random stuff in crocks and cupboards, or the magazine archives, or most of the how-to books. It’s funny how I always realized we were maybe more than average readers in the family – it was not and is still not unusual for dinner conversation to be completely absent because everyone is reading at the table – but it never quite hit me how many books we’ve managed to accumulate. Mom and I spent part of Saturday going through the books to see what we might get rid of, as Dad wanted to see if we could clear some shelf space for him to use for filing. We went through old university texts of Dad’s, novels, children’s books, comics, local history, dictionaries and phrase books, gardening books…you name it.

A couple hours later, we had 6 boxes of books to donate at the second-hand store, plus some puzzles and games, and some stuff set aside for my aunt’s children. Now those 6 boxes do not represent more than, say, a quarter of the total of the books in the TV room, and that room has maybe, maybe, a quarter of the books in the house. They get read, and re-read, and on top of that, Dad and I still make good inroads on the public library, I have my stash at the apartment, Mom trades books with her sister, and my sibs do a fair bit of reading too. Almost makes me wonder how we manage to get anything else done.

Sunday, we boiled up a pot of walnut husks and chestnut hulls and onion skins to dye old sheeting. Mom is going to weave a rug to go with the TV room's new look. It;s going to be very cool. Pictures, though, will have to wait until my next trip.

Brilliance in Action

A couple summers ago, I dyed a bunch of fleece with logwood and indigo, and got it all carded together on a drum carder to make nice tweedy batts. I finally finished spinning and plying it, counted the yardage and decided there's enough for a sweater. I think it's going to be this one.

So I set the twist, and then noticed one of the skeins looked a bit funny. Most of them looked like this:

One of them looked like this:

It was still all kinky and hadn't smoothed out at all. Now occasionally I try to ply something in the wrong direction, so I checked and that wasn't (quite) the issue here. Turns out I spun one of the singles S-twist and one Z-twist. Yep. And didn't notice anything wrong before this. Some days ya wouldn't think I managed to make it through grad school, eh? Now I'm going to have to take the plies apart and ply each one to itself if I want a decent yarn. Good thing I wasn't planning on starting the sweater right away! 

Fiber Spa Fridays

Tomorrow is Friday, and that means spinning day!
In the Fall, several of us got together to do some natural dyeing, and it ended up as a weekly event, now known as Fiber Spa, complete with pot-luck. When it got too cold to do the dyeing out in our hostess's garage, (and most of us had used up our available fleece and yarn), we switched over to spinning and knitting and crocheting...always accompanied by good food, lots of laughs, and an appreciative audience to show off our work to.
We missed last week, thanks to the storm that wasn't there (predicted 10 cm of snow, actual fall closer to 3mm), so I'm looking forward to it. Now Spring is coming, plans for next season's dyeing are beginning, and so far it looks like indigo fermentation and wood chips and bark are on the list. Such simple things keep us happy, eh - really, where else would you find people excited over pots of sawdust and things that smell like stale urine? 

Seussian

Last spring, my mother decided that she would like to get some heritage-type chickens for our yearly meat/egg replenishment, and since a friend of hers was hatching some, that's what she got.

Not the best as meat birds (very slow growers), but very pretty, all different colors, and she kept a few for eggs. There appears to be some Chantecler and some Auracana (sp?) blood in the mix. Which latter means we're getting...

Green eggs. And sort of olive ones also. I think I need to see about some ham (but pink, not green), just so I can tell people that I had green eggs and ham for breakfast.
My Autumn Rose progresses, albeit slowly. Julia helps by holding my book open.

New Challenge

The last couple of years, I've been a member of the local weaving and spinning guild. This year, they're doing challenges, and I've signed up to do the spinning one. The basic idea is that everyone gets  an identical 150g (or a multiple thereof) package of fibers, and has to turn it into a finished object. It's going to be really neat to see what different final products come from different people, as I've seen happen in similar challenges for quilters.
Part of the challenge, when we were initially discussing this idea, was to have a chance maybe to work with fibers you hadn't before, and experiment with how they behaved. I've tried quite a range of different things, though, and as I've been thinking about this, I'm planning to challenge myself in a couple other ways.
- Fine spinning. The cria is probably the thinnest I've done, so I want to spin laceweight for this also. Plus I only asked for 1 package, so spinning fine will get me more yards of yarn to play with.
- Shaded dyeing. I saw a really neat dye technique where you roll it all the yarn up in a ball and dye it like that so the color will shade from dark at one end to light at the other - or from one shade to another if you redo it starting from the opposite end with a different color.
- Lace design. I haven't done a lot of lace knitting, but I am liking it, and I'm challenging myself to design a lace shawl that will use this shaded yarn. It would end up with the center one color and the edges shading to another, which I think would be really pretty.

So I've started working on the lace design, even though I haven't even gotten the fiber yet. It's tougher than I thought, probably because I can almost picture what I want, but it's the figuring out how to convert from brain to product that's getting me. If all goes well, it will have buds and blossoms on it, shaded light rose to deep cerise/magenta, and I'm going to call it 'Crimson and Clover'. I was listening to the song last week, and it does fit what I want to do. And I want a title, because the finished challenge projects are going to be displayed at the MVTM - the textile museum in Almonte - which will be pretty cool.