Not knitting... but yechhhh

I wanted to get this out in the open. I suppose I think writing about it will keep me from having nightmares. DH and DS spent the afternoon in the yard mulching, and ended up killing not one, but 2 snakes in our yard. Yikes!! It makes me not want to go outside. Last year one got on our screened porch and I came within a fraction of an inch stepping on it. This is the first time we have had 2 in one day, though. I suppose all the rain we have been getting made the river across the street rise... at least that is where I am thinking they must have come from. Maybe living so close to a river wasn't such a good idea after all.

No knitting (or little knitting, in this case) makes Carolyn a dull girl. I haven't been able to stick to any one project for long this month. I am still working on the first sock of the Weaver's wool pair I started at the first of the month. But, I did make some progress last night and am finally working the toe portion. I need to go to an inspirational knitting meeting, I suppose. I won't be getting that this month (or even a visit to my knitting guild meeting). I keep switching the yarns I am spinning, also. I just can't seem to settle down and get anything "produced" lately.

On a better note, though, Bill brought me a knitting book home from his most recent trip to Augusta. Without consulting me, he managed to pick out a very good one (and one that I do not already have). It is Montse Stanley's book. I did not realize what a wealth of information is contained in that particular volume and am really glad for the new addition. Oh, and speaking of books, Elayne managed to buy a particularly fascinating one the last time we met in Jacksonville. It is Knitting on the Edge by Nicky Epstein. Has anyone else seen this totally awesome volume? Now, there IS inspiration.

Sharon has me rolling in the floor with this new link:

Essay Generator

Go play with it... It is a hoot! This thing puts together the funniest essays, as evidenced by Sharon's on Yarn Diets. I decided to try one on knitting in the summertime.

An essay on Knitting sweaters in summer

The subject of Knitting sweaters in summer is a controversial issue. In depth analysis of Knitting sweaters in summer can be an enriching experience. Until recently considered taboo amongst polite society, it is yet to receive proper recognition for laying the foundations of democracy. Crossing many cultural barriers it still draws remarks such as 'I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole' and 'i'd rather eat wasps' from global commercial enterprises, who just don't like that sort of thing. At the heart of the subject are a number of key factors. I plan to examine each of these factors in detail and and asses their importance.

Social Factors

While some scholars have claimed that there is no such thing as society, this is rubbish. Upon Peter Pinkleton-PishPosh's return to Britain he remarked 'class will refelect the inner hero' [1], he, contrary to my learned colleague Sir George Allen’s recent publication ‘Into the eye of Knitting sweaters in summer’, could not have been referring to eighteenth century beliefs regarding society. While the western world use a knife and fork, the Chinese use chopsticks. Of course Knitting sweaters in summer raises the question 'why?'

Did I mention how lovely Knitting sweaters in summer is? It grows stonger every day.

Economic Factors

Is unemployment inherently bad for an economy? Yes. We will study the JTB-Guide-Dog model, making allowances for recent changes in interest rates.

Annual
Military
Budget



Knitting sweaters in summer

There are a number of reasons which may be attributed to this unquestionable correlation. Of course the annual military budget is in financial terms 'holding hands with Knitting sweaters in summer.' Strong fluctuations in investor confidence have been seen over the past two financial years.

Political Factors

Posturing as concerned patriarchs, many politicians guide the electorate herd to the inevitable cattle shed of 'equal opportunity.' Placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice can produce similar results to contrasting Knitting sweaters in summerism and post-Knitting sweaters in summerism.

It is always enlightening to consider the words of a legend in their own life time, Bonaventure T. Time 'Political idealists must ideally deal, for I daily list my ideals politically.' [2] He was first introduced to Knitting sweaters in summer by his mother. If our political system can be seen as a cake, then Knitting sweaters in summer makes a good case for being the icing.
Since the Renaissance Knitting sweaters in summer has become more and more prevalent. May it continue.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Knitting sweaters in summer plays a large part in the lives of all. It questions, 'literally' plants seeds for harvest, and it is human.

I'll leave you with this quote from Elton Paltrow: 'I would say without a shadow of a doubt: Knitting sweaters in summer ROCKS!!! [3]


[1] Flankton - The Complete History - 1999 Fantastico Publishing

[2] Time - Yes Indeed - 1987 Indegro Books

[3] My Knitting sweaters in summer! - Issue 4 - BFG Publishing

I am starting to have the urge to knit something totally mindless. Minimal counting, no shaping, etc. What is happening to me? Sometimes, I just crave the soothing qualities of repetitiveness, I guess. I am thinking maybe a simple triangular shawl. I am really not a scarf knitter, except for working with silk, and I don't have enough of that spun to do anything with yet. I spent part of yesterday afternoon trying to free up some of my bobbins. I plied some light and dark blue singles made from fiber I had blended on the drum carder. I really like this effect - it is sort of tweedy, without being muddy. I also am plying some more of my silk/angora/wool blend. I am just itching to start spinning the Blue Faced Leicester that I bought in Dahlonega. It seems to be very well prepared, and I think I could make a beautiful shawl or ruana out of it. I have been wanting to make a ruana forever. In fact, I have a green woven one, and it is that particular item that prodded me into doing fiber art. (Granted, I am not weaving, and don't plan to take it up, but I just loved the feel of the wool, etc).

Well, it's time to go downstairs and get ready to go to the bridal shower. This is the first time I have every been invited to a shower in the morning, so it should be interesting.

Congested weekend ahead

Do you ever have everything pile up together in a heap? Granted, I am notorious for being a "last minute" person, but it seems to be getting worse the older I get. This weekend I have a bridal shower to attend, 2 gifts to select and run out and buy, a meal to prepare for a family going through a hard time and nursery duty on Sunday at church. I admit I am guilty of thinking about this stuff too much, agonizing over what gifts to buy, etc., but I am already tired just thinking about what all I have to do.

Bess was commenting yesterday about "brain fog." It seems that happens to me all of the time lately. It is very frustrating, and fighting against it does not even seem to help. I have a very detail oriented job which requires a lot of reading and making subjective decisions, so usually by the time the work day is over, my brain is on overload. It is aggravating when you are used to having your mind serve you well, and then, all of a sudden, it doesn't. I suppose that is one of the reasons that most of my blog content is about my knitting and spinning. I truly enjoy writing about the hobbies I am passionate about, but the creative juices do not flow easily for writing about much else.

Okay, Catherine and Marg, I've taken your bait. Here's my list:

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Wow, I don't look like I am very well read. Actually, though, there are plenty of books that were left off this list. For instance, how come they listed Frankenstein, but did not list Dracula? Yes, I read Dracula and liked it very much. It must have appealed to a hidden alter ego though, since I don't particulaly like horror stories. I guess there are a lot of books today that are considered classics that were not (or in some cases, not even written) back in the dark ages when I was in school. Here's some additional classics I have read that are NOT on the list:

Silas Marner - George Eliot
David Copperfield - Dickens
Great Expectations - Dickens
Oliver Twist - Dickens
House of Seven Gables (arguably the MOST boring book I ever had to suffer through) - Hawthorne
Julius Caeser - Shakespeare
Othello - Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare
1984 - Orwell
Tom Sawyer - Twain
The Hobbit - Tolkein
The Fellowship of the Ring - Tolkein
Sense and Sensibility - Austen
Emma - Austen
Rebecca - DuMaurier
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - McCullers
Member of the Wedding - McCullers
East of Eden - Steinbeck

Here's some of my stuff I bought in Dahlonega and also what I have been working on.

Sock yarn I bought at Magical Threads:



More sock yarn, that is turning into a sock:



Here is my Jacob wool in various states of being:

Carded batts and yarn (2 ply - spun by long draw method)



And, singles still on bobbin



I am so happy that I have finally learned the long draw. It makes spinning go so much faster and also seems to be less stress on my hands.

Last, but not least, here is the merino/silk blend I bought at The Spinning Shop.

This doesn't seem to add up!

1. We have two computers.
2. I have a brand new digital camera.
3. I have plenty of knitting and non-knitting photo ops.

For Sharon and others who are wondering what's up with the pictures, this is it:

#1 (newer) computer works great for the internet, I can block pop-ups all day long, etc., but it is NOT great for uploading pictures. I thought when Blogger came out with the new, free picture hosting... hey, here's an idea. Well, it is not for Macs, which this computer is.

#2 (older) computer, windows based, works very well for uploading pictures. However, it is in our son's room, and up until today, you literally had to blaze a trail into his room. I returned from a great day in Jacksonville with Elayne to find he was working on that situation. So pictures really are coming sometime in the near future!

I have socks in progress and my first woolen skein that I really do like. So stay tuned for more information.

I thought I would never say this, but I'm tired of traveling right now. Yes, I enjoyed my vacation trip immensely, but we turned right around and went to Augusta to work to avoid all the possible pandemonium surrounding the G8 summit. Thankfully, all is calm up to this point, and I am so glad to be home. Motels can get old after awhile, especially when you have to get up the next morning to go to work.

We stopped in Savannah on the way home and made a trip to Primary Art Supplies, since I wanted to get some Jacquard Acid Dyes. Well, at least I thought that is what they had. Come to find out, they had everything but... they had direct application dyes, silk dyes and Procion MX dyes, even the liquid concentrate, but alas, not the acid dyes. I guess I am the only oddball around wanting to dye wool. Yeah, something's wrong with this picture. I play with wool in 100 degree weather. There now, I've confessed! But hmm... the silk dyes looked very nice and were already in liquid form, and I've not tried dyeing silk yet. Maybe that will be my next big experiment.

When I got back home, I plied a little of the brown Jacob wool that I scoured, teased, carded and spun. It looks like it will actually be pretty nice. I have been practicing the long draw lately, and I think the yarn is going to look good. Also, I am currently knitting a pair of mock cable socks with the autumn colored Weaver's Wool that I got in Dahlonega.

Same, but different.

We had a great time in Dahlonega, but a few things had changed. There used to be a public access to a river where you could play around and pan for gold. Well, that land has been bought, and a golf complex has been built, so now you cannot pan for the gold anymore. Then, we thought to visit a winery and vineyard we had discovered on our last trip. Apparently last time we went on a weekend, because it was closed the whole time we were up there. There was also a charming Folkway Center and art gallery the last time we were there (in fact, it was there I had my first "spinning in public" experience). They also had marvelous handspun for sale there. Well, you guessed it... it was also closed!! I did manage to get to The Spinning Shop, but also had a shock there, as the owner is selling her marvelous farm and farmhouse. She has decided to downsize and give up the hard work of being on a farm. She sold her Shetland sheep flock last month. Fortunately, she hopes to keep up the shop on some sort of basis. I did get to spend a couple of marvelous hours on her back porch, along with a couple of other spinners. No, I did not bring my wheel, but I sat and chatted and knitted and asked a bunch of questions and enjoyed tea and spice cake with the group. And yes, I bought fiber (like I really needed it!!) I got 1 pound of brown Bluefaced Leicester, 8 oz of a mostly blue merino/tussah blend and 4 oz. of tencel to blend with fiber to make sock yarn out of. Also, I purchased another niddy noddy and a book written by the shop owner about natural dyeing.

I took Barb's (schoolmamma) advice and visited the knitting shop there and came away with some Weaver's Wool for socks and some cotton Fixation, also for socks.

We were still able to eat at our favorite places, and found a couple of more interesting places to visit. Seems they have opened 2 antique malls right off the square, so we piddled around in there for quite awhile. I saw something described only by the seller as "antique yarn box," but it actually was some sort of spindle. The bottom portion was a box - sort of like some wooden tool boxes you see occasionally. The handle portions came up from each side, but then there were holes drilled in the handle pieces, and a shaft with a wheel on was one side and a spindle was on the other side. It sort of reminded me of a kick spindle. I would assume that one would work the wheel with one hand and draw out the fiber with the other. I could not decide whether to buy it. It would have needed some work to make it a "nice" antique, as the spindle was bent and somewhat rusted.

We left on Thursday morning to go to Fayetteville to visit my dad. Thursday night, I found out my cell phone was missing, so Friday we called and fortunately tracked it down, but unfortunately, it was left in a restaurant in Dahlonega, so we made the 1 1/2 to 2 hour trip back up there and then headed home. We got in last night around 8 pm, but went to the late movie at 10 pm. Yes, you can bet all of us slept late this morning.