So much fiber, so little time

Fiber (fine) art

The Rijksmuseum Dashboard widget popped up a painting from 1529 of a woman spinning. She's using a double-drive wheel, but it's hand-turned with some sort of stick or tool. There's definitely a flyer and bobbin, rather oddly placed in relation to the  maidens. Interesting!

The weather is here, I wish you were beautiful

It's a really sad state of affairs when a dewpoint of 68F feels like a major improvement. Nonetheless, the outside air is drier than the inside air, so now we listen to the roar of fans sucking and blowing.

I'm swatchin', yes, indeed

Cue Knits Domino, because I'm really happy with the swatch for the body of the new shawl design in Zephyr. A warning, though: if you use stitch patterns from Bäuerliches Stricken 1, check very, very carefully for errors. I corrected several while translating this particular chart into the symbols I use.

I still need to play with swatches for the neckline/front bands and decide how I want to handle the bottom edge. So far, the band, adapted from the main pattern, looks good, but I'm still not sure if I want to "fancy up" the lower edge.

Textrix news

(Textrix = Latin for female weaver. Apologies to any male weavers reading this, but, historically speaking, tough noogies. Console yourselves with nauta, poeta and agricola.)

Anyway, Webs is having a weaverly sale through August 4th, including their natural and half-bleach linens at 30 - 40% off. I've woven with these, and they're great. Have at it, those of you with discretionary income!

Also, I've been playing in Fiberworks with Swedish lace blocks that someday (soon?) will become bath towels. My cotton huck towels have saved the day in this particularly hot and humid summer, so they obviously need friends! Unfortunately, while my right brain can see the pattern quite clearly, the left brain is a little slow to translate. I poke at the draft when inspired.

On the knitting front, I'm deep into the design process for a new shawl, a pattern I hope to sell. It will use Jaggerspun Zephyr in a lace pattern that reminds me strongly of woven huck. It may also have a beaded edging, depending on how the swatches turn out.

5 Things

5 Things always in my purse:

I never carry a purse. Women will never be free until all our clothing has functional pockets! If I'm in the house, there's a lip balm in my pocket. Outside, I add keys, wallet and loose change.

5 Things always in my wallet:

1. Driver's license
2. Car registration
3. ATM card
4. Credit card
5. Receipts from ATM

5 Things always in my refrigerator:

1. Milk
2. Eggs
3. Green curry paste
4. Garlic
5. Partially used can of cat and/or dog food

5 Things always in my closet:

1. Cat carriers
2. Clothes I'm not currently wearing
3. Extra toilet paper/paper towels
4. Suitcases
5. Cheap wire hangers

5 Things always in my car:

1. Insurance card
2. Canned cat food (for the barn cats)
3. Emergency tool (hammer for breaking windows combined with a seat belt cutter)
4. Digital tire pressure gauge
5. Air compressor

5 Things always on my desk:

1. iMac
2. Bootable backup drives
3. Video deck
4. Audio deck
5. Scanner

5 People to tag:

1. Charleen
2. Caroline
3. Janice
4. Julia
5. Valerie

More silliness

The Zidane Head Butt Game. It's almost as good as Clay Kitten Shooting and the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
 

Need a smile?

If you've got a broadband connection, watch this happy dancing guy. Sit back and smile! I'm particularly fond of the Shetland Island segment.

'Ot and 'orrible

I truly hate summer. Give me snow drifting up the wazoo, because I can dress for it. In summer, however, there are aesthetic, legal and physical limits to removing clothing. Fortunately, my house is shaded on the south and west by very large trees, so I can open windows and air out earlier than most other people.

These two bucks are taking advantage of the shade. I swear that sometimes my backyard looks like a casting call for Bambi: bucks, does, fawns, rabbits and skunks all hanging out together.

A break in the weather

Since the table is back from its vacation and the weather has improved a little, today is blocking day. Here's the open-front circular shawl, in Schaefer Anne yarn, drying. I do love edgings with pointy bits - they're so much faster to pin out than straight edges.

More felinity

That's Mr. Runt on the left, posing with a glob of canned cat food on his nose. In the other, he's jumping on his mom Midge. She's Jeeves' slightly younger and smaller, but nearly identically marked, sister.

I've measured a short sample warp for the Frida Kahlo Andrea shawl and will dressing the loom shortly. The warp will be 20/2 silk set for twill but woven in plain weave with a 60/2 silk weft. I'm aiming for a warp-dominant but very drapey fabric to show off wide stripes of the multi-colored Andrea flanked by narrower stripes of a solid neutral color.

Finished!

Whee! The latest shawl is finished, at least as far as the knitting goes. I hope I can block it tomorrow or Saturday: my blocking table is currently vacationing in the Adirondacks, but I think it's supposed to be home tomorrow. Turning the edging around the final corner was amusing, because I was knitting with the computer on my lap in order to type in the exact instructions as I worked the decreases. I'll try to translate my raw notes into an actual pattern tomorrow while I'm waiting for the table's return.

My next project will probably be a woven silk scarf. I need to do some sampling to estimate yardage requirements, but I'm leaning towards something multishaft and block-ish in summer & winter or crackle with the Andrea yarn as the pattern weft and 60/2 silk as the ground. After that, I'm hoping to design a shawl pattern to sell myself, probably in 2/20 wool or 2/18 Zephyr, depending on what's in the stash.

Another question for the universe: why do smoke/CO detector batteries decide to give up the ghost in the middle of the night? (Maybe, like car alarms, they get lonely?) Anyway, I was awakened by an intermittent "beep" at 2:30 this morning, courtesy of the CO detector. Since all the windows were open and fans were running, CO was not exactly an issue, so I just ripped the batteries out and went back to bed.

Vinland, Vinland, Vinland*

A whole heap o' wild grape vine, which I pulled out while waiting for my neighbor's cable guy visit and which will rest in situ for a while waiting for deer munching (they do seem to like wild grape vine).

Today's exercise in relativity: how is it that a complicated edging seems to knit up faster than a very simple one? I'm using a 20 row saw-toothed edging on the current shawl, but I feel as if it's going faster than a simpler edging.

*Hum the Monty Python Finland song and think of Vinland.

In the dark

Or at least we were, metaphorically speaking, this morning when the power went out. We've been having off-on/off-on episodes lately, but after 5 minutes without power, I started the generator to run the sump pump. (While Ithaca hasn't gotten nearly as much rain as Binghamton did, the ground is certainly more than saturated, and, in fact, water was puddling around the sump by the time I got down there to run the extension cord out to the generator.) Since Ithaca is also not an early morning town, particularly on weekends, a 6:45 outage meant that I was one of the first to call the power company. No storm + 2 hours out probably equals fried squirrel. That should make Julia happy :)

But it was still productive time. I have a nifty battery pack that will run small electrical stuff for hours, so I plugged in the iPod and speakers and picked up the latest shawl. It's now ready for me to start the edging. Later, though, since I feel more like reading right now :)