Archive for the ‘knitting’ Category

I’ve been trying to not obsessively check the package tracking, and I thought I was being fairly mellow about things. Then I realized I had a typo on one of my labels that made it incorrect. All my checking and checking again and reading over everything and making sure the right label with the right information got stuck on the right card and attached to the right object. I’m actually not all that surprised there was an error with all the different pieces involved. Each yarn had six printed stickers to go with it. And several times I stuck on the wrong one only to realize it seconds later. I tried to set up a system as much as possible so that I got everything together correctly, because this is a huge project to try to organize.

So, needless to say, I was in a panic. I calmed down enough to contemplate my possible options and then sent the mentor an email. It was still a little early here on the west coast to call her. But the registrar is in North Carolina, so I called her. She is the one who will be handling all the boxes anyway. She was exceedingly helpful and would be happy to attach a new label if I sent her the correct one. I was so nervous about it I even got which label it was confused. (I had the wrong number of plies, which is on the yarn index card, but the others are correct.) I immediately printed out a new label and stuck it in an envelope with a snippet of yarn for easier identification. I’ll run it over to the post office in a little bit and it will go out today. As much as the official instructions are intimidating, confusing and even occasionally conflicting, the people have been friendly and helpful and for this I am thankful.

Now, with that emergency resolved, I can continue on with my weekend. A bunch of local fiber folks are getting together for a retreat at someone’s home. I’m not bringing a spinning wheel and I even decided to not bring a spindle. I have some knitting to do, a gift project, that is about as close to mindless as you can get without it being a garter stitch rectangle. (It is basically a giant dishcloth, exactly the kind that aunts and grandmothers have been knitting of 4-ply cotton for decades.) Which is good, because I’m going to sit on my butt by the pool all weekend. I’m going to chat with friends and bake bread and knit and generally not do anything I don’t feel like. I might teach some weaving, I packed the frame loom and a bunch of assorted shuttles, shed sticks, weaving swords and rods.

I haven’t done much with updating the website, but I do have pictures of most things to put online. A few yarns went out without photos but I still have samples of most of those so I can at least have something up. I’m going to take it easy with that because I have a bunch of things to do, for this website and others. I have a ton of article ideas that have been on hold to get written, in addition to starting on my summary of the COE process. I’m not going to publish anything on that until I get the results back, but I’m starting to think about how this has gone and what I want to say about it. But right now there is a deck chair in Petaluma with my name on it.

I went off to a farm event this weekend where there were cute lambs, spinners to hang out with and Sally Fox and her cottons. I had been trying to contact her for some details of her organic colored cottons, so I wanted to go and speak to her in person. And I even managed to get a ride with friends. (There aren’t many farms near San Francisco, so it was a bit of a haul.)

Sally was happy to talk to me about cotton and I got all kinds of interesting technical data. She has done quite a bit of work developing new varieties of colored cottons and I wanted to be able to include those in my tables of fiber data for the COE. Many of the sources suggested in the reading list are decades old, before colored cottons were commercially processed. Sally pretty much created the commercial natural color cotton business and continues to develop new varieties.

I also finished the swatch from the 4-ply yarn I made of the medium woolen single. I knitted and then felted it, with baking soda in the water. This wool won’t make a hard felt so the finished fabric is still quite elastic. The thick garter stitch flattened a lot and I steam pressed it for a smooth finish.

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