Category: General Page 13 of 49

It was a very full day. I took my dad out for a dim sum brunch for Lunar New Year. Then a quick stop at West Marine to pick up a part to fix the marine toilet on my boat. I decided, what the heck. I have 2 hours before the kick off. So I replaced the said part. It was a gorgeous day at the marina. I was tempted to just stop there and take a nap on the boat. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything with me — No Kindle. No knitting. No spinning. I felt naked.

So I went home to pack up the supplies necessary to keep me occupied at the Super Bowl Party at the club.

I may have over packed.

Projects packed:

• Metro: I was half way down sleeve 1
• Current sock in progress: toe up, just missing the cuff of one sock to complete the pair
• A couple of Kuchulus and some fiber, just in case I got bored with knitting

What I actually worked on:

• a couple of rounds on the sleeve before I deemed it too hot to have a full sweater in my lap
• a few yards of spinning

I am almost finished with the Metro now. The sleeves are complete. The collar is knit and grafted together. I just need to attach it to the neckline and weave in the ends.

I’m quite happy with the yarn that I spun. I spun up all the singles first. I labeled all the bobbins in numerical order, divided them into thirds. I then plied 1 bobbin from each third in order. This resulted in a nearly homogenized yarn in terms of both yarn size and color.

I love notebooks. I love all the possibilities that a new blank notebook represents. When it comes down to actually writing in a new unblemished notebook, well…I get performance anxiety. What if what I put down doesn’t meet the expectations I have of all those possibilities? What if my ink splotched on the first page? And a misspelling or grammatical error on the very first page casts a pall over the rest of the pages? It’s better to leave them blank and dream of the beautiful notebooks that they will become…someday.

I started to use the little Moleskine Plain Cahier Journals for my project and class room
notebooks (4th one from the top in the photo). I take a new one of these each time I head for a retreat (SOAR, Madrona, CNCH, etc.). Notes from all my classes go into these, along with random thoughts or phone numbers that I pick up along the way. At $8 for 3 notebooks, they aren’t too expensive. They are plain. Very plain. You can decorate it as you wish. Or glue the name tag from the retreat on the front as a momento. Whatever. There is no anxiety involved in scribbling in these.

I started to use these for projects too, but I find that there are too many pages for a single project. I can collect multiple projects in a single notebook, but I often can’t find the most recent working notebook so I start a new one. The cost for the project notebooks can quickly start adding up.

There was a discussion at Janine Bajus’ Feral Knitter about Project Journals that got me thinking. I like the idea of using blue books. There are only a few pages so that it’s extremely conducive to tracking a single project. My only problem is, aside from being to lazy to head down to the University Bookstore, that I really like grids, not lines. I like grids because I can use the grids for designing color work or weave structures and scribble and color away. I looked at how blue books are made. Have you? It’s just legal sized paper, folded in half and stapled in 2 places. I’ve got some legal sized paper in the house. So, I present to you my version of mini project journals.

My inaugural use for one of these was for the yoked sweater sloper, based on notes from Janine Bajus‘ Fair Isle Yoke Sweater Design class at Madrona last year. It seemed fitting, doesn’t it? I’ve created a little tutorial on how to make these mini-journals, including a template for the grids. (You can also get to the tutorial from the Tutorials tab above.)

Have you ever noticed that, every once in a while, you just get into a color rut? You find some yarn that you absolutely can’t live without. You bring it home, put it away, and then, bam! There seems to be quite a selection of that color, even if it is hand painted yarn, fiber, what have you.

Blues

Then I tried to shift out of my blues into greens…

Greens

As it turns out, I didn’t shift very far from the color wheel. I shifted from the red side of blue to the yellow side of blue. And those with eagle eyes will note that the cone on the far left is the same yarn as the lower-right yarn on the blue montage.

See that skein on the right hand side of the greens? It was 2 oz of Polwarth Luxury Blend that Jen snuck into my last order. I couldn’t leave it natural. I wanted a teal. But, as you can see, I put a bit too much yellow-green into my dye stock. And guess what, it turned out to be almost the same green as the green in the 2 collapse scarves: one made last week (center; Lisa Souza merino lace), and one that will be going on the loom this week (bottom; handspun Spirit Trail cashmere/bombyx).

So, sometimes, you just need a friend to kick you out of your color rut. Kathy picked out this Mountain Colors Targhee (Ruby River) for me at the Winery last weekend.

Does this mean that I’m moving into a red phase?

Editor’s Note: Snort! I just looked at the post on the website and noticed that the towels in the previous post were blue and sage green. I think it just serves to drive home the point…This color rut is rampant!