Adventuring

In June we are going to be departing Atlanta for parts further north. We are going to Canada for a few months visit, and to help my mother in law open her yarn store in Dartmouth. Fun! Our passports are all applied for and now..we wait and plan.

The husband has been picking up freelance jobs for a few people here and there, with a hopeful, more long term contract on the horizon.

I’ve been back in school for the last couple of semesters. It has been interesting attempting to juggle everything. And by “interesting” I honestly mean kind of…impossible. I’m not sure if I’ve touched my spinning wheel more than four or five times since I got it all set up.

I’m hoping to get better in the groove of time management, but it’s proving slightly more difficult than I thought it would be. I do know, however, that I need to get up early in the morning instead of this up super late at night thing we’ve had going on. I think this will be change number one. The next will be to start making daily lists. After those…we’ll see.

I took this photo of the kids a couple of days ago. Logan has been asking to carry Calliope around a lot more. I think he’s feeling more confident in his abilities. As a result, I got an awesome photo of the kids. And, um…don’t worry about Lilly’s face there…that was all pink marker. Heh.

May 2: Skyline | May 3: Worn Today

This is the closest I got to a skyline yesterday: the cover of a book about Canadian immigration. (That’s Toronto in the photo.)

Worn today: A recycled sari wrap skirt from Enwrapture. Comfortable and beautiful!

May 1: Peace

For the month of May, I’m going to be attempting to do a Photo A Day challenge, put on by fat mum slim. Today’s theme word: peace. I’m going with the ultimate peace – that of sleeping babes.

Yarn Along

So, this isn’t exactly a knitted project, but I figure..I’m making yarn, so it counts, right? Right!

I started with this:

That is half a brick of 100% silk from Oliver Twists. My friend Elana, way over yonder in Dublin Ireland, said she was sending me something in the mail after I got my spinning wheel. I checked the mail one day and there was a package from her, and that was what was in it. A beautiful heap of this amazing silk.

I let it sit there, and I stared at it for several days. Then, while my mom was in the hospital, I needed do so something, anything, to take my mind off of things. So I chose to start spinning up this silk.

So far, I think the silk has been both the oddest yet smoothest spin I’ve had so far. It appears to be far more forgiving of extra twist than wool has been, and because the fibers are longer, I think that contributes more toward a beginning spinner who is just figuring out that whole pinch-pull-spin combo. Let me tell y’all. Its not as easy as it would sound right at first, at least, it wasn’t for me.

At the time that Calliope scaled my spinning wheel, this is what I had on the bobbin. I started off with some basic wool to get back into the rhythm, then I switched to the silk. The wool isn’t anything terribly special, I don’t know what type of wool or anything it is. Honestly, its some wool that I had bought and intended to use as stuffing for a waldorf doll!

Pigtails.

She has just discovered the love of pigtails.

This past week

Combing some of my dyed wool. This is Border Leicester dyed with Greener Shades dyes in “Amethyst Purple”.

“Lilly” the highland cow.

She gets my attention by scaling the spinning wheel. (Yes, I stop the moment I see her coming, no worries of pinched [or worse!] fingers here.)

I love how he dotes on his littlest of sisters.

Our little container garden

Its not big, and its really nothing much to look at, but we at least have some things going! A lot of this was really an experiment in planting things with other things. heh.

From the dye pot…

Border Leicester. 2tsp of “Amethyst Purple” Greener Shades Dye in 5qt of water with 4TB of citric acid.

I can’t wait to see how it’ll spin up!

Sickies.

This has been a house full of sick people this week. Which has been astoundingly frustrating. Last week we didn’t go to the homeschooling group because, well, it was spring break for everyone else and so our normal park would be flooded. This week was supposed to be our group egg hunt…and we couldn’t go, because we were all busy being sick as sick can be. Totally not fun, let me assure you.

I think the last time I was sick like that was, well, I think I was pregnant with Calliope. Miserable. At least this time I wasn’t pregnant! ha.

In addition, we were all tiptoeing around, trying desperately to not get my mom sick. See, she was scheduled for surgery today. She has since had the surgery, and is now recovering well, thank goodness. A few weeks ago she landed herself in the hospital with some severe anemia, and no one could figure out quite why. Finally, they found a mass, and that’s what was removed today – as well as them being able to figure out the extreme anemia. (That was a combination of events, but not really related to the mass.) The mass was not cancerous, so we’re all pretty damn happy at this point!

As far as we go, we’re all recovering from this stomach bug. The husband is on the tail end of it and fending it off far better than I did. Fingers crossed that it doesn’t affect Calliope!

Kiwi!

Part of our planning this year included making one big purchase for each of us, after making sure we had at least most (if not all) of this year budgeted. This comprises our birthday and Yule gifts to each other for 2012. So what was my pick? A spinning wheel. I’ve been eyeing one for years now. And as an aside, I’m hoping to open up to selling a variety of my own works: hand-dyed yarn, hand-dyed & hand-spun yarn, hand-dyed fleece, and so on. Speaking of, I cleaned a raw shetland lamb fleece last week – it was the lamb’s first shearing. And all I can say is that little guy played well.

She’s an Ashford Kiwi. I’ve managed to spin a single that nearly filled a bobbin. There’s a few tension issues, but you know..I’m okay with that! I figure I’ll get that figured out eventually. My first task is to work out how to regularly get stuff onto the bobbin in the first place! My husband tried it out one evening and managed to get a fairly consistent thread, except it was way too thin in places and it just kept snapping on him. So, none of it actually made it onto the bobbin. My first spinning was a gloppy mess, just, oh, all over the place. Honestly, you can barely call it a single! But the next time was with some smooth undyed wool that I actually had leftover from a project that I was using it for stuffing with..and that spun beautifully.