Etherknitter

It scares me so

One $42 spindle, and look where I am a month later.

It keeps getting better.  Lucy of Mind's Eye Yarns gave me a spinning lesson today.  It's remarkable that I could produce attractive singles pretty much by accident before this.   We ranged over wide territory, and when it came to learning spinning from the fold, concepts of twist and drafting began ringing bells.  The light came over the hills, and a new day dawned.  YES.

It keeps getting worse.  I cannot decide between single and double treadle.  I know it will be a Schacht.  We make beautiful music singles together.  It reminds me of a really bad joke that actually speaks to my dilemma:

Sioux Indian to psychiatrist:  I can't make up my mind.  One minute, I think I'm a teepee.  The next moment, I think I'm a wigwam.  I'm a teepee, I'm a wigwam, I'm a teepee, I'm a wigwam.
Psychiatrist to Sioux Indian:  Sir, I think I know what your problem is.  You are two tents.

What is the intelligent woman's solution to this problem?  Buy more roving!  Lucy has lovely seductions in her store:
The brown is Blue Face Leicester, the white is Border Leicester.  The shore bird is inspecting generic wool top in a color I found impossible to leave behind. 

If anyone has thoughts about DT vs ST they would like to share, let me know.  I'm leaning towards DT.

Should I speak of love,  Let my feelings out?
I never thought I'd come to this.
What's it all about?
Don't you think it's rather funny,
I should be in this position.
I'm the one who's always been
So calm, so cool, no spinner's fool,
Running every show.
Schacht scares me so.

Stay tuned.

Knitting is happening, really.  I subscribe to the school of thought that states if you don't have something that looks substantially different from the last time you showed a picture, don't post a picture.  Of course, my conviction is only strong when there is other content to oogle.  Hence the roving, and no Marla.  She is doing well, a few rows at a time, and heading towards armhole shaping. 

The unpredictable physics of spin

I owe the blogsphere a BIG apology.  The weather this past week has been my fault.  Did I feel dreadful about Claudia riding in this heat?  Of course I did.  But I'm not going to change a single thing I've been doing.

It HAS to have been the spinning.   Three facts contribute to my hypothesis. 

1.  Spinning generates heat and friction.  There you have it.  That would be reason enough, except for

2.  The spinning forces counter the earth's axis and spin, shifting the physics in unpredictable ways.  I would love to tell you I was trying to bring a skier's snow back, but I don't yet have control over the process enough to make it predictable.

3.  The uberspinners were at my house yesterday.  Four people, five wheels.  The level of karmic contentment I felt should have been illegal. 

From left, then behind, to right:  Julia's Jensen,  Etherknitter's Louet S10, Juno's Majacraft Suzie, Rosemary's Schacht Matchless ST, Rosemary's Ashford Joy.

Did anyone notice that yesterday was HOTTER in the Northeast than Saturday?  This was despite predictions of moderating temperatures. 

I rest my case. 

I had tipped over the edge on Friday, when I was finishing up an orthopedic case.  The surgeons were about to put a dressing on the patient's wrist.  They use cotton fluffs.   (If you are a spinner, you know where this is going.)  Without any self-awareness whatsoever, I looked at this huge cotton batt, and thought, "I could spin that."  I asked for a piece to see how it drafted, what the fiber length was.  That's when I knew it was TOO LATE.

And I'm not even sorry. 

On Wednesday, Rosemary and I will orchestrate a harmonic convergence, and I will continue on my path to true conversion and light.  I will order a wheel.

Damn.   One of the funniest things about this whole process?  Cassie thinks she has had nothing to do with my decision to buy a wheel.   "ROFL" would be an understatement right about now.   It'll be a toss-up as to which one of us is laughing harder.

The Devil in Dr. Bones

I'm dealing with all this, now, with denial.  Always works.  Until the LAST POSSIBLE SECOND.  Then I look up, and I'm over the freakin' falls in a barrel.  Sumbitch.   By the time you read this, I will be at work, stamping out lives and saving disease.

Oops.  Doctor humor.  Sorry.

I'm thoroughly stressed.  What possessed me to rent a spinning wheel the week I'm going back to work?  What gods laughed, and said I should try something, and look like an fool just before I'm supposed to go back to work and act like my Foot is normal?  Until it becomes a foot, instead of a Foot, this all seems nuts to me.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Learn from my bad example:  if you want to sniff yarn, DON'T try to spin it yourself.

I rented a Louet S 10 for a month.  It's a looming presence in the family room, crouching there, pretending to possess no animus.   

We'll see who wins.

Life is change, how it differs from the rocks

Change is hard.  The Life Change Scale notes that both positive AND negative changes can add up to making one vulnerable to "physical and psychological stress-related" illness.   I SEEK some changes.  I'm going to go visit some wheels today.  I flee from other types of change.

Changing my stiff little toe into a functional unit is more than hard.  It hurts.   Have you ever heard of ice massage?  Take a Dixie cup.  Fill it with water, freeze it.  Cut off the top of the cup so that two inches of ice are exposed.  Run the flat part along the bottom of your foot by your toes.  Use the angled part to weasel in between the toe spaces.  Are you screaming yet?  An ice-cream footache ended with what could only have been frostbite.   Yes, change is difficult. 

I embraced a good change this weekend, when I went back to my personal trainer.  The DH and I share a session.  After I met Armand two years ago, my husband would look quizzically at my sorry ass when I dragged it back to the house after a workout.  "Can't you pay him to leave you alone?"  Despite knowing what he knew, the DH signed on also.

The garden started its midsummer lull early this year.  There are a few stalwarts still preening.

This is Clematis 'The President'.   I post this purple in honor of Norma's purples today.

Interweave Knits had a security breach on their website on May 31st.  Ten days later, they notified me that my credit card number had been stolen, and I should cancel it.  I received the replacement yesterday.  A small modicum of retail therapy is what the doctor orders today.  Too many changes have occurred, and too many changes are coming up for any kind of comfort level to be found.

"Soon you'll attain the stability you strive for
in the only way that it's granted
in a place among the fossils of our time.

Life is Change
How it differs from the rocks
I've seen their ways too often for my liking
New worlds to gain
My life is to survive
and be alive
for you."

--Crown of Creation, Jefferson Airplane

Hummers

This link is not from my garden.   I can only WISH that it was in my garden.  It has a very high "Oooooohhhhhh" factor.  Be warned.

The Wheel of Life

Maybe I've lost focus here.  The frog was damn cute.  But let's face facts.  This isn't Marlin Perkins' Animal Kingdom.  This is a knitting blog.   This is knitting.  This is Marla's back:

The front is coming up to the end of the first repeat.  Rather than knitting,  I have been spending time being brainwashed educated in the topic of spinning.  Poor Marla has been languishing, and is doing some of the piteous crying we all can hear from neglected WIPs.  If I personify my knitting a bit here, TELL me that you are totally innocent and never do that to your WIPs. 

I have two projects I want to start.  I have yarn for both in the mini-stash.  Elizabeth bag is calling out for a chance at a useful life.   The other potential WIP is Leaf Lace shawl, by Fibertrends, in wonderful Judy yarn.    I know better than to put this to a vote.  You would tell me to live up to the Summer of Lace button on my sidebar and start the shawl.   Tough group, this.

The weather has finally made gardening possible.  I'm planting next year's pictures performers.  My husband chased a deer out of our front yard this morning, THEN told me to get the camera.  I'll just flash a flower that was tall enough to survive the large rodent's appetite:

This pretty lady is Clematis 'Candida languinosa' from White Flower Farm in Connecticut.  It's in a temporary spot, which has become a permanent home.  Twining fifteen feet up a Cornus kousa dogwood,  the two have formed an unexpected and harmonious relationship.  You can see the dogwood flowers* on the left. 

I need to look at some of Cassie's wheel links today.   Just in case a wheel jumps into my bags at Rhinebeck, I need to be  prepared.

Mamacate phrased it a different way:   "Well, actually I think that ship may have already sailed..."

*Dogwood flowers are not true flowers.  They are modified leaf bracts.

It's not easy being green

A cold front moved in yesterday.  The temperature dropped 20 degrees in two hours.  Despite the external relief, it is becoming clear that my brain has not recovered from being parboiled for two weeks.  You know the usual rants:  Typepad ate my post, I can't knit worth a damn, I've ripped the same row three times, and the only thing left is to clean the shower. 

Maybe that's why I garden.  Despite the deer, the voles, and the poorly timed precipitation (either too much or too little), there is always something to see.  Here is the big picture:

This is Paeonia lactiflora 'Dawn Pink' from Songsparrow Farms.
She always manages to take my breath away in mid-June.

This is a closer look at a more utilitarian aspect of peony culture:

Bed and breakfast.  He slept through the entire photo shoot, including me running into the house to get the camera.

There will be knitting later. 

Houston, I think we have a problem.

Blogging just wasn't the same before the digital camera era.  How else would we know the of the weird, wacky, whimsical behaviors of our knitbloggers?  Can you think of another group of people who joyfully document their mistakes for their peers?  Short of an inquiry panel into a Shuttle Disaster, or a pathologist's autopsy, both of which fall far short of joyful, we do seem to be unique.

Saturday was an auspicious  day of knitting mistakes.  The Etherknitter really WAS paying attention, which makes the whole episode even worse.  I cast on for Marla's front with a #7 needle, forgetting, of course, that the garter hem was knit on a #5.  So I went down a size, to a #6 needle.  There's two mistakes.  When I finally got that I should be using a #5, I switched at row#2.  There's number three.  Do I keep it?  Do I frog it?  Juno's post was fresh in my mind.  I brought it over to the finished back of Marla to see if I could tell a difference.   It didn't match.  I yanked it out in a fit of pique.  None of this really felt unusual.  UNTIL I realized I had frogged it before getting a picture.  UNTIL I knit up a swatch duplicating the mistake so I could show you a picture.  Now THAT is the aberrant,  abnormal, anomalous part.  The top picture is good Marla.  The bottom swatch on the bamboo needle is bad Marla.  There is a gap between the CO row and row #1 that doesn't exist on good Marla.  Byebye bad Marla.
  (Needless to say,  I CO again last night on a #6, knit row #1 on a #5, and inadvertantly switched to the #6 for row #2 because I had not moved the #6 needle from my lap.  When I finished the row, I just reached for....a needle.  That row was frogged this morning, and maybe I have now moved the #6 to a project bag.  Just maybe.  Sometimes one needs to be stern about these things.)

Yesterday was my Aunt Cele's 92nd birthday.  She is the last one of that generation.  She lives alone and does well. 

We drove to Connecticut to celebrate.  There was cake.

There was food.  There were presents.  She stopped knitting after my mother died in 1998.  This was a dreadful landmark in her life (heck, in anybody's life), because she had been knitting since 1934.  When I started knitting, I leaned on her to knit again.  I brought my FOs and WIPs for her to see.  The Eleanor scarf (a lacey morsel) intrigued her.  I bought the pattern for her, and ZOOM.   She hasn't looked back. 

My mother and aunt knit for me all my life.  It came to an end when my mother died, which is another story for another day.   Auntie showed me her extra special last scarf she knitted before she ran out of scarf yarn.
"It's a Japanese yarn with lots of colors. You don't get bored because you never know what's going to come next.  You can't tell how big the stripes will be, it's fun."  Yes, I jumped for joy when she handed it to me, and said, "Here.  It's yours."  She is not a contemplative woman, and this was clearly a spontaneous gesture.  I have a new Auntie handknit, from Noro:

Which also gives me a way to brighten her life.  She will have a not so secret Pal sending her Noro skeins, and other variegated yarns.  I love her dearly.

Rainbow

Middle English, iris (the plant), from Latin, rainbow, iris (the plant), from Greek, rainbow, brightly-colored gemstone, iris of the eye.

Iris siberica:

1.  Echo the Wind
2.  Superego
3. Ewen

Change is the Only Constant

The Etherknitter looked up at the sky, and squinted.  "Naw, this isn't going to amount to much", she told her husband.  "Bloglines weather didn't predict any rain.  Neither did weather.com.  The clouds are too high".   Last night, before the sprinklers were turned on, we got 1.58" of rain. 

One of the secrets of a happy life is finding delight in small things.   (Did you notice the "before" in the prior sentence,  rather than "after"?  Yes!)  So it is with knitting:  I have a small FO to show you.  Indeed, it is the Sock of Superstition.  You will forgive me, I'm sure, for artfully covering the nonoperated foot.  I would prefer to leave its bony secrets to your own imagination:

It's a basic Knitting Pure and Simple pattern.  Mountain Colors Mountain Goat, Pineneedle colourway.

I'm cured now, right?

I can't BELIEVE how long it took me to motor through simple stockinette.  You would have thought I was knitting lace (measure...same length...knit...measure...same length...).
No matter.  Back to the Marla sweater. 

Yesterday, in the heat and humidity, life in the garden continued its frenetic pace. 
Papaver orientale 'Water Babies', left

Right, Peonia suffruticosa, 'Shima Nishiki'

And, simply, chives in bloom (Allium schoenoprasum):