Miscellany of a Cheshire Cat

My really expensive Viking clothing book arrived today: Viking: Dress, Clothing, Klaer, Garment. It’s delightful, includes some good looking patterns and resources, and in both Norwegian and English. Unlike most romance languages, I can attest that I don’t accidentally start reading Swedish without noticing. There are a few new techniques and perspectives. The archeological evidence for old Norse dress is rather limited – most of the information we have about the suspended apron dress is extrapolation from tiny scraps. Tiny, fine and beautifully scraps between 12 and 25 ends per centimeter (that’s 30 to 60+ ends per inch for those of us backwards folk). This is a practical, hands-on book rather than a historical resource. (I did pick up Medieval Garments Reconstructed: Norse Clothing Patterns with that in mind.) The photos are exquisite and the detail work is excellent and exciting.

This all means that I have sewing to do.

comics, mythtickle, sewing, viking

So, in addition to an idyllic weekend in Massachusetts on top of a mountain out of technology’s reach, we also went to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival. We wandered around for 6 hours, had some warm cider and cider donuts, and generally enjoyed all the awesome sights to be had on a gorgeous autumn day. There was also kettle corn (which sustained us as we tried to get out of the parking lot) and maple cotton candy (which is an amazing invention). I came home with a couple skeins of fun yarn and lofty project plans, of course, as well as some local wine and super-tasty hot sauces.

The hour sitting in the parking lot was spent calling stores looking for pumpkin Woodchuck cider. We eventually caved and reserved some at a store that was not on the way home. Pumpkin Woodchuck is very yummy but not what I’d expected. It’s fruity and bright and lacks the cinnamon and other spices of the pumpkin beers. Yum!

autumn, ny, photographs, rhinebeck sheep and wool, travel

I waited all weekend for the lovely breezes to calm down so I could play with glass and then I ran out of fuel for my torch before I was ready to be done. More MAPP gas is on the shopping list. On a different list, I think I need to pick a mandrel size and stick with it. A few of today’s beads ended up on super-thin mandrels… which is ultimately fine except I should probably plan these things.

Today involved experiments with stringers and practicing round shapes. I think I’m getting better at both the shaping of the bead and ending up with nice, gently rounded holes. I’m not getting it every time, but I’m getting there. Stringers are fun. Accidentally breaking the bead release when working with a large bead is not fun but I saved the bead, lumpy as it might be. Encasing is hard, but I’m getting a better feel for how glass behaves at which temperatures. Someday I will not over-oxidize my red glass.

Transparent glass on transparent glass is not as striking as I think it should be but is still pretty. Frit is fun. Stringers (bits of glass heated and pulled very thin) are great fun and result in craziness. Spirals are SUPER-FUN! I am showing signs of improvement, I think, and I’m having fun so I’ll just have to keep going.

beads, glass, lampwork

Molten glass is the most awesome thing to play with!

I might have made an extra trip to the hardware store today, but I got the torch setup and running! For the record, plastic banquet tables are not ideal for clamping a torch to. You need a deep enough clamp to get away from the beveled edge so that it is really secure. As an added precaution, I added a piece of scrap wood and that seemed to stabilize the setup nicely.

Safety tip for next time: put on bug spray. I got eaten alive in my last 20 minutes outside.

It’s a hot day today, in the 90s down here. Funny how sitting in front of a hot torch melting glass at high temperatures makes that 95 degrees feel more comfortable… The breeze was on and off again but started to pick up more enthusiastically in the last hour I was playing which proved an exciting challenge. It’s hard to keep the glass in the flame if the wind keeps moving the flame.

My goal today was to play in order to get a feel for the tools and materials. I made 21 beads! Some are pretty, some are challenged, some are strange, and some illustrate some mistakes. I started out working far too close to the torch in the blue part of the flame. Several of the first beads got colors that were oxidized and muddy or darker than intended.

Having a plan before turning on the torch was good. Being patient while waiting for glass to come to temperature or for beads to cool was harder.

I think I had pretty good luck with the bead release we made at a Pennsic class. I only had to scrap 2-3 beads because I cracked the bead release. (Bead release is the mud you apply to the mandrel so you can actually get your bead off when it has cooled.) None of them cracked in the fiber blanket while cooling. I forgot about microwaving the fiber blanket to give it a warmer start, but I did wrap it in 2 layers of aluminum foil to keep more heat in so the beads would cool more slowly. I also kept the sizes pretty small so cracking was less likely. I did put one bead into the blanket far too hot and ended up with a textured finish rather than a flame-polished finish. Interesting at least!

I pulled a couple stringers, played with encasing, did some dots and stripes, and generally amused myself for 3 hours. From the condensation on the canister, I think I used most of my first bottle of gas.

I’m still learning – I don’t always get the shape I’m going for. Sometimes the glass gets away from me and strange things happen. Maybe those strange things will get prettier as I get better at this. ;) Darn… I guess I’ll just have to practice more.

beads, glass, lampwork

On the aforementioned trip to Maine, several other colors happened as well. These are 2 of the first 3 skeins we dyed and are More Sock Yarn. The light gray/black skein came out of the dye pot before we added the blue dye. The batch was a practice run/proof of concept to make sure these blue-blacks were really what I was looking for. And they were.

By the way, steam doesn’t help when you’re trying to take pictures of yarn in the dye pot! This is really a pity because the colors are so gorgeous, especially after the water has cleared. All the different layers of color under the water’s surface was just mesmerizing, perhaps to the point of distraction. Stirring the dye pot was not actually encouraged for this technique but I really enjoyed it. I did not enjoy having to simmer the yarn and wait a whole 20-30 minutes before dumping, rinsing and hanging it out to dry. Waiting is not always one of my strengths… especially when there are pretty colors to be had!

Of course, it helps that my mother’s dye pot is big enough to hold several small children… but that becomes rather important if you’re trying to dye 8 skeins of bulky yarn all at once. Which was our next project.

It really never hurts to learn from an expert, I guess. I’m very very very happy with how all the colors came out! Not that dyeing is rocket science, but chemistry was also never one of my strengths either so having a practical demonstration I could participate in really helped.

Plus it’s fun to play with colors. Perhaps too much fun. As long as I don’t dye everything bright-frickin’-turquoise[1], we’ll probably be fine.

And, my mother is also a terrible influence. I bought a pattern book and a pattern plus some yarn at her new favorite yarn shop. Some of it is truly lovely green! Yes, I know, you’re dying of that surprise. Plus I snitched a bunch of books from her library. Some of which I am obligated to return. This is going to be a great test of my book borrowing skills as I am, in fact, terrible at returning books. (Oh, hi, Mum. You should have known that before now anyway.)

[1] It should be noted that there is an inordinate amount of turquoise dye in the possession of the myself and my mother.
crafts, dyeing, yarn

Back in April I went to Maine for a long weekend. These three balls of yarn are a mere fraction of the yarn we dyed that weekend. We did 29 skeins total using 3 different techniques. Remarkably, we did not make a huge mess though I suspect the t-shirt I wore is permanently scarred from the project.

These three balls are the “parrot series”. The brighter colors on the bottom of the pile were dyed in the pot by putting dye powder directly on the skeins. That was fun and resulted in very vivid colors. The more muted and darker ball on top was painted. When I was done painting it, there were white sections but the dye bled into those sections when we set it. I actually like how the colors came out better with muted yellow where I intended there to be white.

These skeins are all sock yarn, so there will be some parrot socks in the future!

Mum also sent me home with a mini-dyepot (I say “mini” because hers is big enough to dye 8-10 skeins in as well as bathe in while mine is a more normal sized pot) and starter dyes. One of the skeins I painted didn’t come out to my liking so I’m already planning to over-dye it. For my next trick, I need to start knitting up the yarns!

These photos show the painted skein (the one on the top of the pile above) all wrapped up in its plastic wrap, ready to steam and one of the brighter parrot skeins on the swift getting ready to be wound. I love how rich the colors came out! The orange and blue in the muted parrot are lovely and the richness of the green in the bright parrots is just fabulous. Not bad for a first-time dyer, right? There’s a lot to be said for bright, pretty colors! Besides, bright colored socks are more fun. Trust me. I’ve collected a lot of data.

Here we have the 3 parrots from another angle. You can see the swatch I knit up in the lower left corner. It looks like the dominant stripe, at least on the first ball of parrot, will be the green with the other colors shifting around it. Even so, my swatch was about 40 stitches I think, so not a full round for socks. There are some rather wild socks in my future.

For the multi-colored yarns, I think I am happiest with the skeins we put dye powder on directly because we got such vivid colors from that technique. There’s another round of blue-gray-black yarns that I’ll post another time. We used liquid dye (in the pot) on those and came up with some lovely yarn too. But the powder technique is just so much more *pow*. The painted skeins were interesting too though I need to work on my color layout to avoid blending. So, like everything else, it depends what you’re going for.

Handily, dyeing is really fun so I’ll need to practice and experiment more.

crafts, dyeing, knitting, yarn

After long procrastination of various sorts, some ripping of rows and rows of stitches and a mistake in the heel not discovered in time to fix but in time to repeat in the other heel, I have finished my first pair of adult-sized socks. The yarn is “Walk on the Wild Tide” from Blue Moon Fiber Arts. I have 2 more skeins of BMFA yarn to play with as well as a membership to the Socks That Rock club. So far I like their yarn – it has enough twist to it that it doesn’t split easily. They dying is exquisite though I’m not all that excited by this colorway. (I traded away the first color way from the sock club because it was oh so pink as well… I’m hoping for greens, blues or purples for the next shipment!)

Anyway, pair #1 done. I expect the next pair to go much faster!

My first week back at the gym has been good. I’ve survived. I hate my trainer just a little evil so far… but I suspect him of much deeper, darker, more grueling evil. 5 work-outs in 5 days. I’m taking tomorrow off. I have this faint hope my calves will not be screaming at me by tomorrow. I don’t mind the new awareness I have of my abs, but the calf pain is rather special and impedes my willingness to run around.

By the by… overnight tonight (Saturday), we get to “Spring Ahead” for Daylight Savings. I know, you’re just as excited as I am, I’m sure. Sleep robbery! But at least my purple “iMac” clock will be correct again!

daylight savings, exercise, knitting, sock

So back at the beginning January, I got a terrible, terrible cold that basically took me out for 3 weeks. I was mostly better by the last week of the month but still easily tired out, coughing, and terribly behind at work.

The last weekend of January was fabulous! We drove up to NH for my birthday dinner at the Best Mexican Restaurant Ever (Hermanos in Concord, NH). My brother, Kirsten and the fabulous Juli joined us and riotous time was had with pitchers of white sangria. Birka happened to be the same weekend, so my birthday trip included shopping and medieval fun. Saturday night we went back to Hermanos with another bunch of people, though not the full bunch we expected due to Birka deciding to that Ian should spend the rest of the weekend in a weakened and miserable state. He recovered admirably, but missed out on the best Mexican food ever. The intrepid cat wrangler, Violet, took over the felines for the weekend. It was a fabulous weekend!

Why, yes, we do go to New England for Mexican food.

February brought work and snow. Lots of snow. There are still itty bitty little snowbanks around as evidence. I had a great time shoveling, feeding the wee little electric snow blower and generally frolicking when I had time. Clearing the driveway was fun. Without a good place to put large piles of snow, I ended up packing the snow into some serious fortification walls between the driveway and the sidewalk. Unfortunately, the aforementioned January sick put me behind for work and having to spend serious time moving snow during the week took away from my time even more… which turned out to be okay because the developer is behind too (mostly due to our requests, I’ll admit) and while I could have used another week to get documentation done, it was done in time for training.

Yeah, that was pretty much February – snow and work.

Training was this past week. Monday night I was at Staples at 9 pm making copies. I was delighted to learn that particularly awesome photocopiers have the option to 3-hole punch your copies automatically for you. This saved some serious time! Tuesday we flew off to the Sales meeting in Florida, which was not as warm as anyone expected. Down right chilly! And populated with people 2-3 times my age. I delivered some training for the Sales team, and while, I would have preferred a little more focus, everyone has seen the material now, has a really detailed User’s Guide and can probably pick things up quickly once we start using the system.

Also, I could very easily get accustomed to working in a villa with a view of the ocean. The photo here I took from my iPhone from the balcony of our room. (There are more, from a better camera, but this one was handy.) I saw a dolphin one day while I was prepping for training. I love watching seabirds nose-dive into the water for fish too. Certainly beats the view of the church.

Airport security is indeed still a joke. An old, annoying, stupid joke told by someone who has drunk the kool-ade.

I have almost finished my first pair of socks for adults. (I’ve made wee baby socks before, but not adult-sized socks.) They’re far easier than I expected, despite having messed up the heel. I’m smart though! I messed up the first heel and realized it, and then messed up the heel the same way on the second sock. Perhaps I’m feeling overly clever about that but go me!

Somewhere along the snowy way, my sleep schedule has been reset. Probably the exhaustion from all the snow removal. I am now going to bed before midnight again and getting up around 8. Without an alarm. This is unheard of for me! Of course, it could be a sign of the apocalypse. I wonder if that means I’m one of the four horseman… which one of them wakes up at 8 am without an alarm?

concord, hermanos, knitting, nh, sca, sleep, travel, vero beach, weather, work

I’m apparently having one of those years that flies by. It seems like everything has gone very quickly and all the time I thought I had is also already gone. Such is life, I guess.

The Philadelphia area is threatened with promises of a harsh winter. The local news stations are adding to the hype, naturally. The Farmer’s Almanac actually has us on the border of the cold wet and the cold dry areas so who knows what we’ll actually end up with. I’d certainly prefer more snow to less snow but no one is surprised by this.

I didn’t get very far on Nanowrimo this year. I haven’t had a very productive month as it’s been whipping by. I guess the fact that we were away for the first week didn’t help. I finished a knitting project last night and played with some swatches for some lace patterns with varying degrees of success. I really would appreciate consistent terminology and notation in knitting. I’m told that’s a total pipe dream, but I dream of a day when I don’t have to decipher each knitting pattern according to author’s birth sign, region of origin, phase of the moon and account for current sunspot activity. (Hyperbole, it makes you funnier.)

I have successfully avoided malls all weekend! I did a little online gift shopping and a lot of browsing. I am taking it slowly but I expect the avalanche of the holiday season will hit me soon enough.

holidays, nanowrimo, random, winter

Sunday I took a class at The Bead Garden, a nearby bead store. We picked beads and made wire-wrapped bracelets. The instructor, Gina Struebel, was great and adapted to our different learning styles and abilites very well. Plus she was fun. I’m looking forward to taking her wire ring class next year.

I keep looking at this bracelet in awe. It was really way easier than I thought it would be. There are magical steps involved to make it all come out right, but ultimately it’s a pretty simple process and I feel like I learned some basic stuff that I really needed to know. I’m going to play around more with the copper wire I have on hand. I have some lovely beads that will look great with copper.

beads, bracelet, crafts, jewelry, projects