Silk

I got some great comments on my previous post and they inspired me to fix the blogger app on my phone because I really did take pictures of the silk singles!

So...

This is what it looks like to spin out died silk singles. The unspun silk is super fluffy and soooo soft, just a dream to spin once you get a good long draw draft (?). After I spun these singles I plied them together and I am sort of disappointed in how it looks. I mean, yeah, it is gorgeous, because it is silk died the most wonderful combination of purple and blue and green, so of coarse, it is amazing... but... it is too... heavy? BUT! I did save some of the singles to ply with my blue/green/ocean merino, and THAT yarn is perfect. Unfortunately, I do not have pictures.

That is all for now... Pretty soon, we will be in our new home and I will unpack all my yarn and make have Huz take real pictures of everything and feel like a professional artist... or... I'll just keep spinning and stashing and spinning and giving. 

PS- I forgot to link this in my Wooly Dreams post, but if any of you readers are interested in seeing more aahhhh-mazing hand spun yarn, check out Woolly Wednesday over at Spinsiration. There are some great links, but I'd love to see more so if you spin too post something!!! 

posted from Bloggeroid

Wooly Dreams...

oh, spinning. I have been just spinning. non-stop at my wheel... roving into singles into plied, washed, hung, dried yarn... all the fluffy wool, like a rainbow cloud. soft in my fingers... loving all the finished skeins hanging in the window... mmm... woooollll...

and then i wake up.

and i should be preparing my family to move. Officially. It is almost time. We are leaving the house, and eventually, this town. But all I can think about is yarn. I'm not really knitting at the moment, although I did just knit the teensiest swatch out of some merino single plied with silk (yum!)... No, not so much knitting, and that's ok. Well, I know a certain aunt who wouldn't think so, but tough luck cookie, I packed all my yarn, but none of my roving.

Here is the run down of everything I've been spinning, in my very exaggerated estimations:
(oh also, because I'm awesome, I can never find my tags, so it all becomes mystery merino... i'm pretty sure all the wool I have right now is merino. And the only other thing I've spun lately is that silk {oh.my.god.} . . . )

ok, never mind... it's all merino, or silk, or merino with silk... and the colors are all to die for. *I have this brown the I hope will be the finest yarn I've ever spun- like a 3 or 4 ply... I'm trying to do the worsted (? maybe? i don't really know...) technique for this...  I read that it is stronger and better for socks. and that is what I hope to have at the end- brown, self striping sock yarn. *Then there was about a bobbin full of the yellowandpurpleandmaroon polwarth I bought at the fair last summer that needed to not be on the bobbin because I needed... Any way... I decided to ply it with some merino that had been um, resting? around the back of a chair in the closet for months to test if the big ball of it would look good with some ice white merino combed top I have... both packed. Let me just say, Experiment success! So fluffy and bouncy and bright... *The reason I needed the bobbin free was for this gorgeous merino sea blue/forest green/rainy day hiking color... Spinning the singles and plying them is what got me spinning again... This stuff is my favorite handspun so far. *I spun almost all of my silk. but i don't love it. It was gorgeous to spin, but... *I did ply some of the leftover silk singles with some of the left over dark merino singles and that has become my 2nd favorite. Actually, since there is so little of it, it is just going to get knit up into a bunch of squares for the crazy blanket.

I have piles of new roving in a new color for me... as in: not containing purple, and I have some more purple that will be spun with some mohair locks... I seriously go to sleep at night and see wool. I dreamt about plying the polwarth with the white for 2 nights before I did it, and when I finally did, I had one last night of awesome, wooly dreams and then my fiber focused dreams shifted to the fluffy blue/green/brown roving waiting to be spun...

Hey! that actually turned into a pretty good rundown... When huz gets back, I'll use his phone to take some pics...

I Have Pins and Needles That I Am Sitting On

Packing

There is a stack of packed boxes in the corner of our living room. Empty walls and shelves are appearing all over the house. The white plastic bags full of things we are donating or selling or giving away are piling up. The laundry is almost caught up... it is amazing, I think I'm down about half on clothes for everyone. lol. The move has inspired the purge bug in me again, it is true. I love sorting thru our stuff and deciding if it is something we need or not. I am parting a dozen diapers, toys I've had since childhood, clothes from when my son was small. But removing these things also puts into perspective the things that are important. I am keeping about as many dipes and toys and baby clothes... all bundled up with my high school and college photo albums tucked inside the steamer trunk that a distant ancestor brought over from Croatia... I get a chance to purge the kitchen stuff. Really evaluate what we use and what we don't. This weekend, everything will go out on our lawn with a sign that says "free or donation." I'll probably put a jar or a sign to the mailbox or a sign that says knock or something... or I'll let people figure it out.

I've been so busy packing, and I've been falling asleep with the kids early every night so I'm falling behind. But I feel my wheel calling me... My beloved teacher Helen is at Death's door. I wish I had been there more for her. So I'm going to spin.

moving

I remember when we first moved in here, just me and my beautiful Little A and Isis, our wonder pup. Bean was just about a year and a half... maybe a little older, but not 2 yet. About as old as Little B, my Man-Child, is now... Now that we are moving out of this sweet little house in town. I have been wanting to move into a bigger house since we found out we were pregnant with Little B. And now, it looks like it is going to happen. At the end of this month, the kids and I are leaving this home. This little yellow duplex with the red door... The space where my son was born. Where my daughter potty trained and learned to talk and eat and exists. This place has been our home for over 2 years and now it is time to go. The next chapter in our lives is getting ready to begin and I am soooo excited. I'm not ready to really talk about the next move, because as far as I can tell, nothing is fully settled... but it sounds exciting...

The kids are playing in the living room with those horrid but wonderful Calico Critters, I am having some alone time... well, internet time... that isn't really alone time. i guess.

So much is going on in our world and I find myself conflicted. I can't decide if I want to fully unplug and ignore the world, or get more involved and learn more about the things that matter to me... I can't decided if caring about this shit on a global scale is worth the stress or if I could learn to live with myself for  ignoring everything and focusing just on my family. oh. if only i lived off the grid in the mountains somewhere...

Anyway.

I totally made dinner from a recipe I found on pintrest. These Taquitos. sorta. i didn't actually have most of the ingredients... ok, so i saw the words chicken, cream cheese, and bake and got excited.

aannndddd, now the screams of siblings now longer entertained by one another begins. peace out.

Absence...

I am house sitting for my parents again. woot! It's wonderful to be here with my kids... we get to play in the forest all day, go in the hot tub when we feel overwhelmed, and watch movies on a real tv instead of my lap top. The three crazy dogs are always running around and barking at nothing. I have day dreams of filling the yard with goats and chickens and planting the best garden! But it is hard to get online out here, they only have satellite internet which is about as quick as dial-up. But I have been working out and taking pictures... just not posting about them.

Which brings me to the reason for this post:

Because we have not been at home (house sitting... and our gas was turned off and i'm waiting for huz to get up all the $$$ to get it back on) I have put aside my cloth diapers, temporarily... The man child has had one hell of a rash and Bean is still needing a night time diaper, so I bought 4 packs of the 7th generation paper diapers and some wipes. It was 10% day at harvest so i stocked up. This is actually a great thing for my cloth diaper adventure because it is giving me a chance to wash and strip all my diapers and look at them all in one place, sort out the ones that we can still use and demote to rags the ones that are torn or too small... Plus my beautiful land lady pays the water and since the Man Child started eating real food, the diaper routine has needed more and more water. I still do my best to dump the poop into the the toilet because a) the fecal matter that goes into the trash dump via disposable diapers ends up in our water systems... so essentially we drink each other's babies' shit and b) putting human fecal waste into the municipal trash system is illegal. But few people care or know. We successfully cloth diapered our son for a year and a half. I'm not done with my cloth, but it is time to reevaluate the system to make it work for a big kid instead of a baby. Cloth diapering the new born was the easy part...

Choice, Part 2

There comes a time in few women's lives where she is faced with a choice she already made. I am currently facing the same choice I made several years ago, should I follow him? Well, last time I made this choice, I said "I will follow you to the ends of the earth and back, or maybe just Atlanta..." And it turned out to be a great choice! I have the most beautiful 4 year old in the world because I went to Atlanta with the man I love. So now I must ask myself again, "Do I follow him?" Do we go to LA to struggle together- as he calls it? Do we stay here and go thru all this broke ass shit apart? The kids need their Dad, I need my man. But oh my god, I hate Los Angeles. Everytime I see my friends kids playing with their dads I get all weepy. I never cry about Huz. Until now... I miss him all the time, the kids are always asking for him, the Man Child said his first sentence and his poppa wasn't there to hear it. (The Moon in the Sky, was his sentence, in case you were wondering.) I am lucky, I get to remake a decision that changed my life. I get to reevaluate the things that led me to this life. And I have decided that I made the right choice then... what will i do now?