Ah, so much catching-up to do. This month is, apparently NaBloPoMo, which translates to National Blog Posting Month, wherein you attempt to blog each and every day for some arbitrary reason, and which I have already failed since I didn’t blog yesterday.
Well, I don’t consider that real content, so I’m going to say no.
However, our lovely supreme leader (the boss-man at work) has given us a four-day weekend, and then the husband had to be up for work as usual, and then I woke up with him at 8 a.m., so today’s post is real.
And it contains updates of my fiber progress! The world is officially going to end at 2 this afternoon, by the way.
Firstly, I have been spinning still. I have not been knitting, because I am rather proud of my spinning (I started relatively not so long ago, so this is an accomplishment). This afternoon will see me venture into the wild world of plying (gasp!), and we shall see where that ends up. However, for the time being, here is the second spindle of logwood-dyed wool:
Yeah, it’s dark. My camera is kind of lame. However, if you squint, you can see my single, which is really even and really fine, and makes me really really proud. Here is another view, with different and less orange lighting:
Also one of those for the squinting.
I have another whole bag of roving, plus two more wads of it in the bag I’m carrying the spindle in. I bought it initially because I was overawed by the concept of natural dyes, and there was a huge bin of them, so I picked it up even though the fiber was scratchy. This has been a really fantastic decision. This wool has perhaps the longest staple of any wool I’ve ever used, and is completely mindless to spin. I can spin it at SCA meetings. I can spin it standing in the ChickenGoddess’s dining room, chatting about Charlie the Unicorn. But most amazingly of all, I can spin it sitting in my den, watching Bollywood movies, reading subtitles.
You read that right, folks. You can read subtitles and spin this with a drop spindle. It’s marvelous.
It is still kind of scratchy, but I’ll find something to knit with it that compensates for its non-comfyness.
Now, really this subtitle issue is important, and figures in my knitting location and project choices pretty regularly. I get antsy sitting quietly and knitting. I know that knitting is one of those things you do to clear your mind and find inner peace, but I am scatterbrained enough that unless I’m working on complicated lace, I need something going on to distract me just a little, so that I don’t look up a half an hour later and then put the project down for good for a while.
Movies are great distractions. If it’s in English, I can knit most things while watching the movie, and it works out pretty well. I know what I’m knitting and I know what’s going on on the screen. Bollywood films are a completely different story. Unless I’ve seen the movie before several times (actually, the only movie I can knit to is Koi… Mil Gaia, because, well, you really don’t need to pay too much attention to it to know what’s happening), one of two things occurs:
(1) I make progress with my knitting, but have no idea what has transpired in the film, requiring me to watch the movie over again sans knitting, or rewind it multiple times to catch up. In this scenario, I might as well have not watched the film at all, since I didn’t really see it.
(2) I enjoy the movie but at the end I look down and have either not done anything on my project or have screwed it up so badly that I have done anti-work on my project, necessitating more time working on it without watching a film.
This wool solves a lot of that, in that I can spin it pretty much without looking, except every once in a while, when I miss a little bit of dialogue, but not enough to impact my watching of the film. (The Socks of Eternity are also a good project for this, as I have knit on them for so long that I no longer need to look at what I’m doing while I knit).
I will have to try the spinning with a French film next, which should be even better, since I actually speak more than three sentences of that language (though the other day I was watching Mistress of Spices, which was kind of meh except at this one point when the taxi driver came in and asked “Kya hua?” and I got all excited because I totally understood him in Hindi, and I realize that’s not that fancy but this is hard work so let me enjoy it).
The other catching-up is this:
Remember that I talked about that car that hit the telephone pole? Well, this is the aftermath. You can see, in the bottom right corner, the little hole where the utility pole used to be, plus the tracks in the grass indicating the car’s path into the park. The girl in the green shirt and the girl in the yellow shirt were in the vehicle. A few days ago they fixed the old pole to the new pole using strapping tape. I really hope that’s just temporary.
And today? Well, today I’m on vacation! So that means doing some other design projects for family members, because designers never really take vacations, anyhow.
knitters = angry mob 