Estes Park Wool Market and a 1/2 FO

I had a chance to go to a fiber festival as just a shopper instead of being a worker-bee in a booth since we didn't have a booth at Estes this year. Well, it didn't quite live up to my fantasy--but I still had fun. I went with Hannah and Kelly's mom and aunt--they are fiber folks, too, so we do a lot of fibery excursions together. It was a gorgeous drive up highway 93 to Boulder and then through Lyons and up into the mountains on 36. Everything is so green, green, green (for Colorado--let me qualify). We arrived around 10:30 am and the market was very busy--throngs of people. Hannah did a good job of being patient for the sheepies while we poked around booths and made some purchases. Here she is in front of the Yaks--she was fascinated by them. It was so sunny she couldn't open her eyes--but see the sweet smile! I've been going to this show nearly every year since I was a student at Colorado State University in the Fibers department (yep--that's 15 years). Of course, when I was a student I didn't have two cents to rub together--so it was an exercise in frustration. I remember visiting the Interweave Press booth before I was an employee and browsing through the books trying to decide which one to save my money for. Little did I know what fate had in store for me! And even though I've always had strong maternal longings, I didn't ever imagine what it would be like going to the festival with a 2-year-old. We were all exhausted before long--the crowds, the sun, the two-year-old who wanted to rattle the bars of each alpaca enclosure. Actually, I think in normal circumstances, I would have had a lot more stamina, but I'm on the healing end of a resistant bacterial infection (mastitis--yep, a swift kick in the boobie from a 2-year-old who is throwing a fit on her changing table and threatening to fall off can cause internal bleeding and lead to an infection even if you're no longer nursing--who knew!). 5 trips to the doctor, 1 extremely painful ultrasound, 3 antibiotics, and 6 weeks later, I'm finally getting better, but I'm really fatigued. So that's why my fantasy of being just a shopper and the reality of going to the market didn't quite match up. I did find some knitting needles that I needed and bought some Bonkers fiber. I toyed with the idea of getting a fleece, but decided I better work with the ones I have before I buy more.

I finished the sock! Yay. This is the 1/2 FO since I still need to make the second sock. It is a bit big. Also, I've misplaced my notes and will probably have to reverse engineer the second sock. I'll probably find the notes after I've finished the second sock and can then discover all the differences between the two socks. That is, if I ever get to making the second sock. I'm nearly done spinning the yarn for the second sock. I've been working on it in meetings.


Also, I've been working on a beading challenge issued at work by the Beading Daily editor, Michelle Mach. We were each given a little box full of the same beads and asked to make something with it. I'm making a beaded frame for this picture of my maternal grandparents. The deadline is June 29th and I could finish it real soon if I leave it like it is, or I could get a little out of control and cover every square inch with beads--which is what I'm inclined to do, but probably isn't doable.

Last night my dad brought spaghetti sauce and salad dressing for dinner and asked me to examine the label. It took me a while, but I finally saw that my mom's artwork was the feature art on the label! How exciting! Spinelli's is the neighborhood grocery and they are coming out with a line of natural products that will be at Whole Foods soon. The sauces and salad dressing are very yummy! And of course the artwork is beautiful--a watercolor painting my mom did of their store front in 1996.
Here are the bottles (already consummed) sitting on the potting table that Kelly made for me by recycling one of the old kitchen cabinets and putting a new top on it. I love it so much!

I have a lot of iris to plant! They were saved from the dump--a neighbor tore out their weed infested flower beds and replaced them with new landscaping and all these iris were headed to the trash. One of my neighbors let me know about it and then I got permission from the neighbors who were redoing their landscape to harvest the iris.
Now I just need to find time to plant them! (Here's a better view of my potting table--complete with carrot door pulls!)

Maryland Sheep and Wool, Mother's Day and Cochineal

May is just zooming by.

May 4-7: We went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival--it was wonderful, of course. Some day I'll go just as a normal fiber person and not have to work in the booth and then I'll get to see everything and even buy some stuff. Kelly and Hannah came along on this trip--it was great to have them there. Hannah does a great impression of a sheep. She really likes the sheepies, as she calls them.



So do I!






We visited my Aunt Debby and Uncle Jerzy who live in Delaware on Sunday night (and Monday morning before our flight). It was great to see them even briefly. My aunt is an amazing quilter and her house is so arty and serene. I love visiting. I visited them when I was 14--and Debby was pregnant with her daughter Gena who is now working on her graduate degree at Harvard. I guess that was a long time ago--it sure goes by quickly.

So when I got back from MDS&W we had a visiting artist from Cuzco, Peru in the office--Jenny

Callañaupa Huarhua. She did a cochineal workshop on a Thursday night after work.

May 9th: Wednesday night I stayed up until 11 pm spinning--this is really late for me. I'm often up at 4 or 5 and I really function better on a full night sleep--though I don't often get it.

May 11th: I didn't finish spinning my yarn that I wanted to dye at the Cochineal workshop. So I took my wheel to work and worked on it during meetings and then Andean plied it.

Well. Maybe that wasn't such a great decision. Let me tell you a bit about this yarn. It is the Shetland fleece that I received as a gift last spring from Carol Rhoades--I had washed locks in the sink and hand carded them and filled about half a bobbin before other things intervened and it sat on my bobbin for a year. Yikes. I had also taken a small portion of this fleece to try out the instructions in Spin to Knit for washing a fleece in the washing machine. I have to admit that I didn't think it would work. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be--though it isn't my prefered way to wash a fleece--it does have advantages for speed. I carded that fiber on the Patrick Green carder that I received for Christmas from Kelly. A wonderful gift. I had that batt just waiting to be spun up--so that's what I spun on Wednesday night. It was not as clean as the fiber I had scoured lock by lock in the sink. I spun the two batches of fiber on the same bobbin--that's why I chose to Andean ply them....can you see the slippery slope of bad decisions? So I wound off my Andean plied yarn onto my niddy noddy and was dismayed that it looked so bad. Well, Maggie Casey was in the basement at work shooting photos for her upcoming book (it's going to be great!). I went back and forth--do I take my terrible yarn downstairs? Will she laugh at me? Will she look at me in disbelief? There is an expectation that the editor of Spin-Off is an excellent spinner even though the reality is that the editor doesn't get as much time as she'd like to actually spin...do I shatter that image?

I read my horoscope. It was very helpful--the gist was to be brave, face fears. So I took my pathetic skein to the basement and confessed my sins to Maggie. Not only was she totally wonderful, gracious, and kind--all the things that Maggie alway is! But she was also delighted. I had arrived at just the right moment--she was about to spin a yarn just like mine to demonstrate how to repair a mistake and instead she was able to use my sad yarn to demonstrate that all is not lost.

So Ann Swanson photographed my yarn and Maggie diagnosed it as needing more twist in the ply. I found a swift and a ballwinder in the Knits office and wound my yarn into a ball, then fetched my wheel from the fourth floor (no elevator=good excercise) and added more twist to my yarn (a little too much, ah well). And then Ann shot the after shot and I was set. Profoundly thankful, I rushed off to the Cochineal workshop to dye my yarn.






Jenny speaks English really well--she's working on a project for the Centro de Textiles Traditionales del Cusco and is in the U.S. gathering information for a series of books the center wants to publish to preserve the traditional textiles of the Andes. She spent a week in Loveland learning about book publishing.

I brought fiber to dye as well. We stood around on Linda Ligon's amazing back porch watching pelicans (yep, pelicans) fly by against a backdrop of Colorado mountains and learned about Cochineal and how it is used in the Andes to dye yarns.
We also drank beers and ate peanuts.


I took my yarn and fiber home and rinsed it over the next couple of days (it needed a lot of rinsing). The fiber was a Merino top that I had purchased at the Recycled Lamb. It is pretty felted--not completely, but pretty darn close. The process used for dyeing with cochineal was better suited to yarn than fiber. I was able to card the fiber and spin it, but the fiber is getting torn up in the process--so it is a lot shorter fiber lengths. I may do something else with it.


The yarn turned out beautifully for all the trauma it went through.












And in the morning, I'm making waffles!

We had a mother's day celebration on May 13th. We made waffles, eggs, and bacon in the morning for my family who came over for brunch and then in the evening, Kelly's family came over for dinner and we had kabobs. The celebration included a trip to a local nursery for flowers--Hannah found some that had fallen from plants to play with.

Haircut

Around Christmas, my mom urged me to cut Hannah's bangs. But I was insistent that I didn't want to because I wanted it to grow out so that we could tuck it behind her ears, and I was afraid of going near her face with scissors. Here is a before shot just a couple weeks before. While her hair is getting longer and could be tucked behind her ears, it doesn't stay. But the reason why I finallyI gave Hannah a haircut was because she woke up Sunday morning and was whining and pushing her hair out of her eyes, and then said exasperatedly, "Hair!". It seemed like it was time.
The haircut itself was very quick--I sat her on her little stool on the counter in the bathroom and gave her two toothbrushes (both hers) to play with--one for each hand. Then before she noticed I snipped, snipped and it was done. She said "iee bee!" when she saw little bits of hair falling around her (that means "spider!"). Kelly got it on video--but we didn't get any still shots of the process. The hardest part was getting it straight when she was moving around so much--but her hair is so straight, that it made it easier.

So here is the after shot. She also chose her clothes for the day. She saw this dress that Grandma Jane made for Bri and insisted on wearing it. It will probably actually fit her when she's four. She also wanted to wear the red rain boots that were my sister's when she was a baby. Those are 35+ year-old boots!

We're getting over a virus--well, Hannah is. I think she got it from Will--though it seems like a long incubation period. Will got sick on Tuesday last week and was throwing up for a week. It was scary. Until Tuesday night, I was thinking that we had dodged the bullet since Hannah didn't get sick right away. I took Hannah to the doctor yesterday as soon as I could get her in--she threw up at midnight but then went back to sleep. They said to take her off all dairy until she's recovered. In the morning she had diarrhea, but no fever. She seems to be better already. I'm hoping today it is all gone. No vomiting last night.

Provided that Hannah is better, I'm going to the Stephanie Pearl McPhee booksigning and talk tonight at the Lodo Tattered Cover! I hope that I can get there early enough to get tickets--they only have room for 200 people. I'm packing my knitting and spinning--maybe I'll actually have time to do some while I'm waiting in line! Oh joy!