One Woman's Gathering.

I had the most amazing walk this afternoon. A dear friend took the kids to the movies and I walked the ocean. I parked at my favorite trail head and walked to Virgin Creek to watch the surfers. Mariee Sioux in one ear and the bird song and gentle pounding of Mama Ocean in the other. I sat and listened to her voice for a long while, her music speaks to my soul in such a deep feeling way. I took out the music and listens to ocean and sent my roots deep down into Mama Earth and my branches and leaves as far up into The Sky as they could go. We exist in the middle place between Sky and Earth, a sacred place. I could hear it singing to my heart. I kept listening in one ear to Mariee and one ear to the ocean and walked back along the wave line, my feet soaking in the waves, my skirt tied and untying in each new surge. I walked back to my car bare foot and felt the Earth under me. Getting back into my car and finishing my errands has been like floating. I had just been dancing in the waves and woods and now I'm in Safeway dealing with banking shit. 

It is such an amazing blessing to live in this amazing, beautiful, sacred place. I am honored to call this place my home. 

Flowers

She helped my mom put together this glorious arrangement of spring flowers all found in the area around our home. 

And some flowers are for the forest. We were recently blessed with over an inch of rain! So many wild flowers burst open to the sun light! I simply love this place. This year, I will learn more about the plants we grow in our garden and in this beautiful patch of forest. 

A walk thru the yarden

The first trillium came up today. 

New sage buds are out. 

The chocolate mint from Amy is coming back nicely. I'm almost out of the last batch I dried in the winter time. 

Crazy amounts of lemon balm along the walk way. But it's being eaten by something...?

Our garden is doing amazing things. 

"Captain Hook!"

Pictures from this week, and 3 lessons

When one finds oneself without a car and places to go, one walks. 

When ones hose gets a hole in it, one might water 2 beds. 

When one weaves ones web below the flowering plum tree, one catches petals, not flies. 

More Twisted Willow Fiber...

I've been selling handspun yarn at the Mendocino Yarn Shop and I'm going to be teach my first drop spindle class there! I'm still reluctant to post more things to etsy, my camera phone simply doesn't capture the colors well enough. I'm calling my yarn Twisted Willow Fiberworks, and I've changed my blog address accordingly. I'm really nervous about teaching a class, but it'll be fun. Here are some pictures of some yarn.

Dye Workshop with Nancy Finn

Over this last weekend I got to take a dye workshop with Nancy Finn of Chasing Rainbows Dyeworks. It was quite an eye opening experience. I wasn't prepared for how difficult it would be to find the "right" colors. I don't even know what that means! I took the Second workshop first and skipped the First workshop, the one where you learn about the color wheel and make a sample book of colors. I'm really really in to this color thing, so in a few days, I'm going to start another fundraiser to take the first workshop. Even though I went into the workshop thinking I knew what I wanted, what colors I was going to try and achieve, when I actually sat down with the dye liquid, all my wants got confused and flew away. The results are, I think, amazing. I'm spinning the silk we did the first day, which I thought was going to be awful, but now I'm spinning it and I love it. Love. One of the harder parts of the whole thing was dyeing the the fiber I have left over from Helen, my first and most inspirational spinning teacher. I've been holding on to some of that stuff for years, in its natural colors. The color has inspired me to spin is, which is I think, what she would have wanted.

This is the silk dyed the first day in class. This is absolutely not what I was going for, but I love it!

Day 1 and morning of day 2. I've gotten pink down, K will be so pleased.

The purple is about half the merino/mohair blend I did over the weekend, and all that blue is the alpaca/mohair blend I got from Helen a few years ago. 

Lunch day 2, I realized I hadn't brought enough of my stash to take up a whole day. This is the whole class at lunch when I rushed home, grabbed what I had left behind and rushed back. Yay! 

This was a fun experiment... I spun both of these, on the left is a single spun grey Corriedale and on the right is a 2ply out of the (purple, above) mohair merino. I put them both in the same tray and lay them out together and painted them the same colors, and they look so different. Duh, though... they were totally different colors to start out with, plus, the way they each are spun totally reflects light differently... any way, those will be photographed again in better light and posted for sale in my etsy. someday. eventually.

One of the pink (surprise!) braids was commandeered by K who has possessed a fascination with the drum carder since it came into our house. So, I showed her how to separate the braid by color, then... we referred to the latest issue of Ply Magazine for the article Lacey (MoonRover... mmmm MoonRover...) wrote about how to card striped batts. Somewhere in the middle we snapped the band, and while waiting for it to cool, K became distracted by some dinosaur something and went off to play with Z.

Spinning the silk outside between rain drizzles and 10 second storms. 

The alpaca/mohair blend will be the primary fiber in a thank you sweater I'm making for my brother. When I took the spinning class awhile ago, he drove all the way here (3ish hours) to watch the kids for a day. Then, last weekend, while I was at the dye workshop, the family went to visit him, and he took the kids on a "playground crawl" while my parents were at costco. He deserves a sweater. The next step is find a suitable blend fiber to stretch this out enough for the whole project. 

So It's A Thing...

Starting in about a week, I will have handspun yarns, hand knits, and small woven items for sale in an Etsy shop called TwistedWillowFiberWork.

I'm really excited to be offering the things I love to make to people far away. It isn't perfect, at all, but each thing is I make is made because I love doing it. Even (especially) the projects that frustrate me and make me feel all thumbs leave me feeling a whole lot better at the end. When spinning yarn I hope someone else will knit with, I always hope whoever gets it loves working with the yarn as much as I loved working with the fiber. I hope whoever receives the final hat, or shawl, or monster, will feel all the love that went into it.

In some Yarn Harlot post years ago, she wrote that knit wear is like love armor, it wraps you in love and keeps you safe. Handspun knitwear is even stronger. Every level of love put into something shows in the end result. I don't want people to just buy my yarn because they love it, I want people to buy it, and love it, and pass it on with love, or keep it with love. 

Yarn is very much like love. Knitwear is very much like love armor.

But really I'm totally scared of bad reviews because all I have to take pics with is my iPhone.