Back to Knitting & Spinning!!


The paperwork pile has diminished somewhat although about a dozen of the perpetually late entries are still to show up & the business stuff has only begun. Hopefully all this work will help me buy a NEW portable wheel!! pant pant I've sent my newer Country Spinner off to be viewed & hopefully purchased, by a newby spinner. It spins anything from silk thread to heavy Cowichan style singles very nicely - it spins much better than the old Mud Valley clone - I would've preferred to use it, BUT, my my old one is too persnicketty to sic on anyone. So, I kept the old one. And I've had it since the early 70s, so we understand each other! And I can still pack it fairly easily to any Spin-In while the other is really hard to get into my little car.

But, I haven't been spinning. I've been knitting! Yes, Gail & Karen, I am actually turning yarn into something useful - well, other than socks. I saw the Danish Working Shawl in the latest issue of Spin off & thought - "That's just what I need!" so, I decided to cast it on the needles that day. I found FOUR balls of my splotch dyed handspun in the end & just started on the second ball - if I use it all, this will be huge. You can really see the color variation here too. Here I've been concerned about having enough yarn to knit up something for myself but with this shawl, I've come to realize that I DON'T need a huge amount. Handspun goes a looooooong way! I noticed that with the Arvik sweater too - when I frogged it, I had three largish balls for the whole sweater. And I knit it with two strands.

Haven't done much on my Gluttony socks other than reknit the ribbing after frogging them as you can see in the picture. But, as I said before, I should've followed my own numbers from the beginning on this one. They won't take much time to reknit, I just wanted to get the shawl going until it's too big to haul around comfortably whereupon it will stay home by the TV & the socks will come visiting with me.

Last nite, my Starbuck's buddies, Steve & Kelly, arrived with a huge pot that someone had abandoned in the park across from their house. Kelly walks his dog - aka, the Dirty Little Dawg - several times a day in the park which is a semi wild gully park with a salmon spawning creek at the bottom. The boys're always hauling crap out of there. Anyway, they arrived with this huge, heavy pot of BAMBOO. Since I'm not much of a photographer, you don't really get the scale of this pot. The guys figure it weighs about 150 pounds & it took two of them to get it into the truck!!! Now I've been saying for a while that I'm going to get several big tubs & plant bamboo in them as a forest on the side of my patio to keep the kids from cutting thru. So, when the boys saw this, they brought it over to my house. It may take an axe to split it up but I figure we should get at least four big tubs planted! Now, if I wasn't planning on moving this summer, I'd get a big box about 8 feet long & 2 feet wide built & plant the bamboo in that!! I love to hear the wind rustling thru bamboo & grasses. I'm such a fern, vine & grass person . . . . .