Popped!

So, a few weeks ago I finally warped the new loom, wove almost 10 inches, and...got the first contraction. Four hours later, Papoose was born. She's huge, abundantly healthy, and we're all doing great. Birthday was June 13. No idea when I'm going to finish weaving that first scarf, but the prospects for knitting while breastfeeding look pretty good!

Ready to pop

Hello all!! Thanks so much to every one of you for the lovely comments last time - so wonderful to know I'm not posting into a void here, despite my hiatus! I missed you all while I was gone!

My FO parade is definitely slowing...for which I blame both end-of-semester grading and my increasingly enormous girth and weight (I've gained 35 lbs and it's ALL in front!) But I did finish two more items recently:

The Little Sister Dress:




The Violet Sacque from Vintage Baby Knits:



This may be it for my pre-baby knitting, except maybe for another cap or toy and maybe some burp cloths. My mojo has nearly dropped again to first trimester levels, and I've been busy as a bee with last-minute errands, checkups, shopping plus the grading pile, which never seems to get any smaller no matter how much I work on it. But there's another reason. Next time I have a moment for crafting (after making the much-needed curtains and swaddle cloths) I'm going to WEAVE!!

See my new loom????



It's a Schacht Flip-n-Fold, from Beth's shop. I luuuurve it, though I haven't actually woven anything yet. In bits and pieces of time I've been educating myself and digging out some appropriate stash to experiment with, but I haven't yet had the time and space available to warp it, which is the first step and not something I want to interrupt, at least the first time I do it. I hope to be able to do that before the little one arrives!

Announcement: said little one will henceforth be known on this blog by one of the two nicknames she's going by most often right now: Papoose, or Junebug. So you know.

The Junebug is BIG and the midwives have told her she can come whenever she pleases as of now:



And now before I go...some EXTREMELY belated pictures from last August! Apologies for not posting these in an even remotely timely manner, but now that I've dug them up again, I didn't want to let them go unseen. We had such a wonderful time at the Allegan Fiber Festival and stash-building at Beth's shop in Howell! And I managed to talk my college friend K into coming with us to the fiber festival and guess what, she learned to spin while there! ha. She was a crocheter already from way back, so I knew she'd be "hooked" pretty easily, har har.

Here's me and Kari at the fiber festival, being awed by soft yummy fluff (was I ever that flat-bellied??!):



Then Hubbus drove me over to Howell for some serious stash-building at Beth's shop, the Spinning Loft. You may recall how I posted last time that Beth had to give me one of those gigantic ziplocs to hold it all? Ahem...





Here's Beth demonstrating that it really will fit in the suitcase:



I may have mentioned before that my friend Beth is a very dangerous temptress? I can't recommend her wonderful shop enough, but - beware! It's a dangerous place. Here she is with her bouquet of spindles.



Also, remember last time I showed the Maggie batts I had spun up, from batts made by Beth's daughter Maggie? Here's what they looked like originally:



Now take a closer look at those tags:



Too adorable to resist, even if the batts weren't beautiful in themselves, which they certainly are:



Through all this fiber diving, Hubbus waited more or less patiently, since Beth let him use her laptop to check the news (this was last August, during the Russian-Georgian conflict)



What a very sweet Hubbus! He attended the fiber festival, too, as he did the year before. Of course, he got promised a handspun sweater in return...that was August, and I still haven't started that spinning!

Yes, I'm still alive!

Actually, I'm not only still alive, but I've gone and created Life! With some help from Hubbus. Yep, we're preggo:



Aaaaaand...that's not my only excuse for having let the blog hibernate for months and months! I also started my new job in the fall, and then over the winter break we moved to Queens! It's been a bit busy around here - so much so that there was more than a month when I didn't even login to Ravelry! !!! My keeping up with other blogs has also been decidedly spotty - I try to catch up every couple months or so. Not sure I can say what the future of this blog will be - frankly, once this kid comes, I have NO IDEA what will happen with ANYTHING. But if anyone is still out there reading (??) I thought you all deserved to know where I went.

Also, there's a possibility the blog may actually pick up in a whole new way in the fall. You see, I'm planning to teach a new course called "Women's Work" on the history of textiles. Mind you, this will not at all be a technical history of textiles themselves, or even very much about the making of textiles, but rather a standard upper-level undergrad discussion course incorporating gender, technology, and commerce over a huge range of time and the whole world, using women's textile work as the case study, sort of. Anyway, I'm very excited about it. If you know the wonderful book Women's Work by Elizabeth Wayland Barber, that will be one of our main texts and our starting point. I plan to teach the most basic rudiments of spinning, weaving, and knitting so that students can understand some of the technical details required to evaluate the literature we'll be reading, etc.

To that end, I need to learn to weave! Ha! Because you know I needed an excuse to finally take the final fiber arts plunge! So I'm shopping for a small, folding loom. I also want to try to teach myself naalbinding. I figure all that might very well bring me back to the blog pretty regularly - but we'll see.

In other news:

• My new job is awesome and I love it.


• It also takes up a crazy amount of time, so far.


• This was not unexpected, but an adjustment all the same.


• I got preggo rather soon after starting the new job.


• The first trimester, on top of the first semester, totally kicked my ass.


• I didn't knit.


• Or spin.


• Seriously.


• I don't think I did anything but write lectures, sleep, deliver lectures, and sleep, for weeks and weeks.


• I certainly didn't eat!


• Once I finally made it to the second trimester and winter break (almost simultaneously) things improved drastically.


• So, naturally, we promptly moved to Queens, a process which ate up every moment of time and every iota of energy from Christmas to after the first day of classes in the new semester.


• We originally intended to buy, and spent weeks on that process before it all fell through at the last minute.


• At that point, our lease was almost up so we started over with the rental market.


• We almost got a really affordable 3BR 2 bath with a VIEW, but lost it at the last moment due to a stupid realtor. GRRRR.


• We ended up in a nice 2BR, big enough (just) and in a nice neighborhood, for the same amount we were paying for a 1BR in a crappy building in a crappy neighborhood in Manhattan.


• One month after moving in, rents plummeted. Sigh.


• We're using our extra room as a guest room, aka "project room" where lives my stash, my knitting books, my spinning wheel, and Hubbus' various toys.


• This room gets floods of morning light and we LURVE it.


• The baby, if you're wondering, will live (for her first couple years at least) in our largeish and delightfully clutter-free bedroom.


• She's going to be a she.


• So far, so good with the pregnancy - no serious issues, no terrible complaints.


• I can't get more than a few hours of sleep in a row, though, so I haven't been able to do much other than work and knit since we moved in (the moving took up all of that much-hyped 2nd trimester "energy spurt").


• I'm at 33 weeks now - she's due in the middle of June.


• In theory; babies in my family are always really late.


• My knitting and spinning mojo came back with a vengeance as soon as the nausea and the 3-naps-a-day period ended along with the first trimester.


• That said, all the projects I was working on before getting knocked up are still pretty much where they were in my last post of many moons ago (the first-handspun cardigan, the handspun vest for Hubbus, the seafoam scarf).


• Instead, I've been popping out baby FOs like nobody's business. Here's hoping the kid comes out as easily! (ha!)


• We can't say what the kid's name is going to be because of Russian superstition (that, and we haven't definitely decided between 2 good possibilities), so for the moment we're calling her, variously: Turkey, Princess Butterball, Papoose, Parasite, etc; my mom is calling her Pukala, which apparently means something like "little girl" or "doll" in Dutch.


• Unfortunately, in Russian "Pukala" means "she farted."


• No doubt, this will be appropriate too, and maybe already is, but we can't tell while she's still inside.


• She kicks, wiggles, punches, stretches, and readjusts her position constantly.


• In turn, our new hobby involves poking and prodding her constantly, just to watch her react.


• I can now spend serious amounts of time just staring at my (gigantic) belly.


• Who needs to see toes? Toes don't do anything interesting.


• I probably wouldn't have even gotten around to posting this, or finally updating my projects on Ravelry, except that I overdid it walking around during these last two days of nice weather, and I pulled something, and/or aggravated my shin splints, which is so not fun while carrying around 22 extra pounds. So I'm spending the day prone with my feet up.


• One of my awesome adventures before overdoing it was stopping by Purl Soho for a book signing by Kristen Rengren, aka Retroknit on Ravelry, author of Vintage Baby Knits which came out with SUCH perfect timing for me! It was a blast to meet Kristen and also sinsofthedove from Ravelry


• Just a few weeks earlier, I went to Knitty City for Franklin Habit's visit. I couldn't make it in time for the main event, but I still got to meet Franklin and several other awesome RavFriends, like KnittingFiddler and Jesh and the TsockTsarina. We had ourselves a blast!


• All this has made me SO anxious to finally get to Rhinebeck this year. Hoping, hoping, hoping.


• With a 4-month-old, of course...

Parade of current FOs and WIPs (further details, if any, on the linked Ravelry project page):

Miss Dashwood:



Feather and Fan Bonnet:



Tomten jacket:



Heart hat:



Brittany Jumper:



Garter baby blanket:



Soaker:



Topaz dress:



Little Sister Dress:



Violet Sacque (first of many projects in the queue from the new book, Vintage Baby Knits):



But don't worry - I haven't forgotten my spinning! There was a long break over the move when the wheel stayed packed up, and there have been some frustrating experiments, but some things I'm really proud of. Most notably:

Maggie batts (made by Beth's daughter Maggie, of The Spinning Loft in "Playtime" and "Berry Swirl":



Chamelon Colorworks BFL in "Peacock" (also from The Spinning Loft):



A colorway called "Beth's Curse" of I-forget-what, also from the Spinning Loft:



Noticing a pattern here?

Yes, I didn't even get a chance to blog about my last great fiber adventure, last August, before I immediately got sucked up into the abyss of the school year. I went to the Allegan Fiber Festival for the second time, and far more excitingly, I visited Beth's shop in Howell, MI for the second time. I went with a mission to get a bit of, well, practically every kind of fiber there is, to supply me for spinning adventures for many months to come. Many months later, I'm still doing really well. :-) Beth, and her shop, were as amazing as ever. She had to give me one of these GIANT XXL ziplocs to hold it all, and it took up a whole suitcase on the way home. And now Beth is doing all kinds of exciting things like writing articles and hobnobbing with famous people! Not at all surprising given that Beth is about the nicest, most generous, and most talented fiber person I know (and that's really saying something!) What had been becoming an annual pilgrimage to Allegan and the Spinning Loft may not happen this year because of the tiny new arrival in June, but I'm hoping we might make it in winter, at least. By then I'm sure I'll be working on my weaving stash!

Adding to the Fiber Stash

It’s getting boring to start every post with an apology for how long it’s been since my last post, so I’ll just not.

I’ll just show you some super-pretty wool instead, okay?

‘Cause yesterday I got another box from The Spinning Loft (yep, you can order online now). I know, I’m going there in August so why couldn’t I wait? Because I had to make sure I finally got my paws on some Abby batts, that’s why! They go fast. (They’re made by this Abby.) And then, Beth mentioned that she had a lot of BFL. And I’m now a complete sucker for BFL. And she had some in oatmeal. Oatmeal. Like it wasn’t good enough to eat already.

So looky at the box that came, complete with pretty tissue-paper:



Please note presence of delicious Abby batts.



That’s orchid sock – specially blended for sock knitting. It’s superwash/romney/falkland/merino/tussah silk. I’m trying to remember I’m still on a budget, so I got a modest pair of wee all-too-cupcake-like bits. I’ve been wanting to try getting singles nice enough to actually knit with as singles, so that’s my plan for this, and I’m hoping to have enough for footies.

Meanwhile, apparently the Abby batts I picked out were a tad light, so Beth being Beth, she threw in “a little something extra.” This “little” something was:



4oz of kettle-dyed BFL. MMMMMmmmm. I know, you wanted to wrap the roving around your neck and wear it as-is, don’t you? I do, too. And I just might. Although the other possibility is to spin it up and make the morning surf scarf from the cover of the summer Spin-Off. I’m actually already making one of these scarves, in a yarn I spun from one of my birthday fibers that my dad bought for me when we were in New Hampshire, which turns out to be very much like the fiber/yarn that the designer used. However, if you’ve seen this issue, you’ll know that they show a whole lot of variations of the scarf in lots and lots of different handspun yarns. And every single one is luscious. (The yarns totally make the pattern – which is actually very simple, so much so as to be obvious, but a heaven-sent perfect match for handspun). So I found myself wanting every last one of them, maybe especially the one from kettle-dyed fiber (yes, the one in the magazine is red, but I swear that’s not the only reason I especially love it). So now I’m thinking I could make a second scarf in this new kettle-dyed BFL, and if I’m really generous I might let my mom have it for christmas. Maybe.

In the meantime, while I’m on the topic, here’s the morning surf scarf that I already started, from 4oz of merino/silk from the Fiber Studio in New Hampshire:











I think that this may be the best spinning I’ve done to date (I had to put one bobbin through the wheel twice to get enough twist in to ply it, but otherwise smooth sailing on the fast flyer) – it’s the most recent except for the sweater-size project that’s on bobbins right now (she says mysteriously, saving that project for another post) – and it makes me feel ready to tackle the merino and (separate) silk already awaiting me in the stash and – now – the Abby batts, all of which have been scaring me. Until now. Yay!

But back to yesterday’s box-o-yumminess. There was that whole pound of undyed BFL, too! Half white and half oatmeal:





I’ll probably dye the white in some fun way, but the oatmeal must remain in its delicious undyed state. Not sure yet what I’ll make with either one, I’m just enjoying touching and sniffing them for now!

In other news, I’ve been working on this cardigan from my first three whole, finished, non-experimental wheel-spun yarns:







It’s a made-up non-pattern based roughly on EZ’s methods, with the stripes meant to compensate for spinning ineptitude and the ribbing meant to give a fitted shape to what is essentially a mindless knit. I wanted a cardigan to leave at my (new! first ever!) office, since I don’t really own a decent cardigan, so it’s practical, too. The red dyed Corriedale is the first real skein from the wheel, and it looks it, as it’s under-plied and quite uneven. Then there are two other skeins, both from the white BFL I got in the box from Beth that arrived the same time as the wheel. I dyed those with kool-aid in two batches, pretty much randomly. You saw bits and pieces of this stuff in my previous three posts. I’m really happy and kind of amazed by how it’s coming out!

The really cool thing, though, is to compare that red Corriedale to this skein of brown dyed Corriedale that I spun up just a week or so (but many, many hours of spinning) later than the red. The original fibers were identical, both from that initial box from Beth:





The brown one is hardly flawless, but way better than the red skein. To go with it, I dyed some white falkland/corriedale that I got as part of the birthday-present fiber, with kool-aid and tea and coffee. The idea was to roughly replicate the colors in this amazing Brooklyn Tweed vest, which Hubbus would very much like to have for himself. His favorite colors are browns, orange, and blues. I would have liked to get a rich royal blue for this, but couldn’t make it happen with the kool-aid, so I settled for a denim blue. I also couldn't replicate that wonderful oatmealy color that Jared got (which, for the record, was his found yarn, not the hand-dyed handspun), so this my resulting variation:



I’m pretty happy with the spinning, but not so sure about the dye-job. Verdict is still out until I actually try knitting it up in 2-by-2-row stripes.

And oh, did I forget to show you the lama fleece Beth sent me “to play with”??



It’s the thing I was whining about not knowing what to do with in my last post. I’m starting to feel ready to figure it out. And I bought pet combs and brushes to help me! More on that experiment as events proceed. And I’ll show you the two cool new-to-me spinning-related tricks I unvented (which may well be known to everyone else, but I was excited nonetheless). And I’ll show you what happened when I solar-dyed merino and tussah silk! Although I might wait to show until I’ve spun some up…I’m hoping it will look better when spun, although it’s no tragedy, because if it doesn’t I’ll just dye it again.

Yeah – that’s the truth of it. I’ve been having too much fun with fiber to even blog about it. :-)

P.S. I had to get two new bins for the craft closet, to hold the new fiber stash and the new yarns I’ve acquired/made in the past year. Here’s a shot of them, including the spinning wheel bag, where the wheel could sit, safely stowed away, if I were ever crazy enough to actually pack it away, which I probably won’t.

Pretty Pretty

A few observations:

1. BFL is incredibly soft. Given its relative cheapness, it's incredibly soft. I could spin for the rest of my life with BFL and be happy. That is, I would if I didn't know about how shiny Wensleydale is. And about the even softer softness and pretty natural colors of alpaca. And the amazing way silk looks beautiful no matter what stupid things you do to it. Sigh. You see how easily this spinning thing can become an obsession.

2. Plying on a wheel is so easy and fast that it's dangerous. Wow. And my super-duper jumbo flyer comes with a big bobbin, which holds twice as much as the regular bobbin. So I can 2-ply two bobbins full of singles and lickety-split end up with about 600 yards of yummy continuous yarn. Love, love, love. The only problem is that it goes so fast I totally forget about moving the yarn from one flyer-hook to another and make really messy bobbins.

3. My dad had been saving his birthday present to me until I got here for a visit, and on a whim on our way back from seeing the new Indiana Jones movie the other day, we followed a sign that said "Fiber Studio" on it. This turned out to be a very glorious place. A huge room full of incredible yarns, plus a really big selection of nice beads, and a wall for fiber and a number of wheels and looms. The fiber/spinning section wasn't nearly as big as what Beth has in Michigan, but the yarn and bead section were truly remarkable. Still, I'm not in the market for yarn or beads at the moment. So I got: 1.5 lbs Coopworth in natural browns. Half a pound of Jacob. A pound of merino (so I'll stop being scared of merino, so Beth will stop making fun of me for being scared of merino) and a pretty batt of merino silk, since Beth was out of Abby batts for the moment (waaaah). In other words, I'm building myself up a pretty little fiber stash even before I get into Beth's shop in person in August, a stash-acquisition trip I've been planning on since before I got the wheel (since there are no spinning shops in NYC that I know of, and no shop I know of anywhere matches Beth's selection). Will have to contemplate storage issues soon!

4. Then again, at the rate I've been spinning, maybe not. I'm on the last half of the kool-aid dyed BFL from Beth, which is going to be knitted up with the red Corriedale, which you've also already seen, into a cardigan. Oh yes, I have big plans. I also tried out my fast flyer and experimented with spinning as thin a thread as I could get. It seemed to go well until the bobbin got kind of full, then suddenly the treadles became harder to push, and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. I played with the driveband tension and the scotch tension and just made things worse. So then I tried Navajo-plying what I had, and it broke every two seconds, so I think I underspun the whole thing. Next plan is to run it all through the wheel again and add more twist. Still don't understand the mystery of why it suddenly became difficult toward the end of the initial spinning, but when I went back to the regular flyer and the BFL, it was back to easy-peasy spinning, so I'm ignoring the problem for now.

5. Beth: So I pulled out all the llama fleece and....what the heck do I do with this stuff now??? So far I've only spun from fiber that was already arranged in a more or less long-lengthy-thingy that is not yet string but clearly doesn't have that far to go to become string. Do. Not. Get. The. Llama. What do I do?? Other than smell it and fondle it and making everyone I know touch it and admire it (of course). Help!

6. You're all really bad at suggesting names for spinning wheels, guys. Really. But you can do better, I know you can. Pretty please?

7. No, I haven't forgotten about knitting. I'm working on a cabled cardigan from my brown Soviet yarn, which I started in Moscow. I'm on the last third of the second sleeve (but haven't started the body yet). Sadly, it doesn't photograph well at all - it just kind of looks like the beginning of a hairshirt. You'll have to trust me that it's much better in person:

Some pictures and a meme

Beth continues to prod me to blog even though I'm really much too busy spinning, and occasionally dyeing fiber. So here's a quick meme and some pictures before I get back to spinning. I can't stop! It's way too much fun! (To prove to you that I really am completely obsessed with the
spinning, I'll confess that I've barely even logged on to Ravelry lately. I know, it's crazy. But that's how much fun spinning is, I tell you.)

“The rules of the game get posted at the beginning. Each player answers the questions about themselves. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.”

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?

May of 1998. That would be towards the end of my free school-year between graduating from college and going to Russia for the first time. I lived in a studio apartment on the north side of Chicago, commuted back down to Hyde Park for the same library job I’d had during my senior year (preservation department – I prepared and processed books that were being preserved on microfilm; it was my first civilized job and the highest paying to that date, at I think $7.50 an hour, if I recall correctly). I was mostly saving money and applying for various fellowships that I wasn’t actually eligible for (because I’d graduated but not yet started grad school). Also applied to Ph.D programs that spring.

My studio apartment was partially subsidized by my parents because my dad needed a place to house a whole lot of digital video equipment he was experimenting with at the time. That summer, the two of us made his first, experimental longish video – a history of my paternal grandmother’s family. I’m still proud of how well it came out, and incredibly glad we did it then, because a lot of the people we interviewed didn’t live much longer.

That August 17, the ruble crashed and the Russian “Financial Crisis” began. I arrived in St. Petersburg on Sept 1. As I recall, there was also a major airline strike and my flight almost got cancelled indefinitely. But I arrived alright – all funding plans fell through because of the crisis – the first of many visa crises ensued – lived on kasha for a while – got a job (first teaching job ever, liked it, to my surprise!) – found out I got into grad school with funding – fell madly in love with the city of St. Petersburg. Returned to a road trip around the western US with one of my best friends from college for the whole summer before grad school. Those were good times. Funny how remote it seems from the other side of the long, dark tunnel known as Grad School.

15 years ago: May, 1993: I was VERY much looking forward to starting college. Couldn’t have been more excited/delighted/ready for it, and that feeling actually lasted right up to graduation, at which point I suddenly felt totally ready to move on. The college years were charmed.

20 years ago: May, 1988: The end of 7th grade. Heading into the nadir of my life: 8th grade. I had thick glasses, braces, and a bad perm. I absolutely despised nearly everyone I knew. School was a soul-destroying joke.

25 years ago: May, 1983: I was eight. I was already a serious Knitter and general crafter.

2. What are 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

Well, it’s almost midnight as I write this, but today I dyed 8 oz of BFL, knitted bit, spun a bit, and watched a movie with my dad and his wife. Petted the doggie. Tomorrow I need to get my act together a bit more and take care of some email, start putting together the materials I’ve been gathering for my class in the fall, and start pounding out the lectures. Oh, and I need to pay bills and make a dent in the vast pile of mail waiting for me. Not fun.

3. Snacks I enjoy:

Chocolate
Pirate Booty
Potato chips
Fruit
Toast, with chocolate peanut butter or cinnamon & sugar

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

• Pay off all of mine, Hubbus’ and my parents’ various loans.


• Buy us a nice pretty house with lilac bushes somewhere in New England, plus a decent apartment in NYC


• Invest enough capital, safely, to be able to live comfortably off the interest for the rest of our lives, plus a travel fund


• Go to SOAR and Meg Swansen’s Knitting Camp and Rhinebeck and Maryland S&W and every other major knitting event. Every friggin’ year, dude!


• Establish some sort of self-sustaining educational charity fund – would take quite a bit of work to find out how to do that most effectively, but I’d want to help add to the sort of funding pools that got me through a PhD.

Funnily enough, I don’t think I’d have any desire to quit my job (now that I have one) – I think I’d still want to do it just as badly. But I wouldn’t worry as much about tenure, and I would definitely take some more time off for travel and fun!

5. Places I have lived:

Holland, Michigan
Ottestad, Norway
Chicago, Illinois
St. Petersburg, Russia
New York City
Moscow, Russia
Ivanovo, Russia

6. Peeps I want to know more about:

I never do this – not so much out of any high-minded distaste for bothering people, as I really don’t think there’s much to be bothered by in a link – it’s not as if one is forced to fill out a meme if one doesn’t want to – but mainly because I find it impossible to narrow down who I want to hear from most. I love to read other people’s memes, and I’d love to hear more from any of the bloggers I know. So if you feel like a meme, consider yourself hereby tagged.


Pictures

First: I improved the tension on my built-in Lazy Kate. This works quite well for me:



This is the wool and silk hankies you saw in the last post, plied (it looks like candy - I love it):



The dyed Corriedale:



Then I dyed my BFL with kool-aid and food coloring, in two batches, one last week and one today. Here's last week's batch, from dye to the two bobbins of singles, waiting to be plied.















I have one more picture from today's second batch, which I offer with an apology for all the many flash-illuminated pictures above, also - I've had a lot of trouble getting remotely acceptable lighting conditions, which is part of why I didn't blog earlier. But now that I've actually loaded these up and looked at them on the big screen, I see that the colors are fairly accurate, even though the pictures themselves aren't pretty, so I'll just let it go at that. Because I have more spinning to do!