One fleece is washes, six more to go. I think next one I was will be one of the little ones. Now that I’m over my fear of the washing machine it should go a bit faster.
I’m spinning up the Lincoln like crazy, totally forsaking the carding process as I like just pulling the locks up a little in order to loosen them and then spinning it on the wheel. I think I have about 6 lbs. of the gray and black lincoln after washing.
For the first time, I am using the washing machine to wash my fleeces. I’m nervous– so I started out with the one fleece that won’t break me if I lose it. This fleece is so filthy, anyway it’s just soak and spin, soak and spin.
What’s the worst that could happen? Felt balls, huge felt balls.
Uploaded a picture of my fat little face to my profile. And this picture of the sleep deprived me.
Nice huh?
It was record breaking heat today here in Oregon. 101degrees f on the thermometer here (in my backyard) which is consistantly a couple of degrees cooler than the house or front yard. It was too hot for me.
Adorable baby picture alert. This one’s a couple of days old, but it’s a classic.
Isn’t she the cutest? We were playing with her on our bed and trying to get her to feed herself a cookie, Lexi has developed this thing we call “princess arms” with her food, she will move her hands away from her food and not touch it. If someone tries to get her to hold her own food or a spoon she will throw up her hands (in princess arm position) and complain. I tried offering her the box, thinking that maybe she’ll reach inside and take a cookie (Lexi loves her teething cookies.) Silly me, she grabbed the plastic bag holding the cookies inside the box and tried to negotiate the cookies (via the bag) into her mouth. She won’t hold spoons either, I’ve never seen a baby opposed to putting things in her own mouth (although Lexi will grab food off of our plates and try to eat it, but she won’t grab her own food, just the big people food.)
I’m afraid the heat has turned us girls into nocturnal creatures. I started doing todays laundry around 12 pm, Lexi woke up so I gave her an extra feeding, and because it’s cooler she felt like playing. I’m actually glad she woke up, the heat really zapped her today and she didn’t have much of an appetite for anything substantial although she managed to demolish an orange creamsicle that Matt offered her.)
Josey on the other hand is totally unaffected by weather, he asked if he could change into his shorts and I told him it was okay. So he changes and I tell him that he doesn’t have to wear a t-shirt if he doesn’t want to. “Why?”
“Because it’s hot.”
He looks at me like I’ve just grown a second head, “I’m fine.”
“Okay.” Silly me, heaven forbid that the kid who habitually forgets to wear pants should run around without a t-shirt. I’m serious, before company comes over I have to check and double check to make sure Josey’s wearing pants. It’s not that he forgets in the morning when he gets dressed, he takes his pants off to do messy things (like paint or sculpt) and then cleans up and (in theory) puts his pants back on. I appreciate that he’s greatly increasing the lifespan of his pants, he does have play clothes that he could change into but he chooses to go sans trouser.
Maybe this is an early sign of his genious. I can hope can’t I?
My loom is almost finished. I gave Matt the rough plans, we made some adaptations and the prototype is awaiting a final sanding and clear coat. That’s the coolest thing about making new stuff, I get to keep all the working prototypes and trial pieces.
People typically don’t understand that to make a new product we have to go out into the shop and make maybe two to ten of something to work out the feasibility of putting it into production. We have to know that 1) it’ll work 2) we can actually craft it in a reasonable amount of time 3)material expenses 4)material options 5)labor intensity 6)marketability. There are other factors but the above six are the major points that have to be worked out.
I’m a big nut about attractiveness too. I could reasonably make spindles out of MDF (medium density fiber board, not Mme DeFarge, although the good Mme deserves many thanks for helping motivate Matt to work on the loom.) that would function perfectly, but wouldn’t that just be the ugliest? Powertools can be ugly, but fibertools and toys have to be pretty. This is a super simple loom with no frills, ambrosia maple, 3 shuttles and one beater, no heddles (maybe later). We’re at a draw on this one, I’m voting for making jigs and doing a small production run to see how they sell, he’svoting for another yet to be designed simpler design.
On the spinning front, it’s taking forever to spin up the ounce of silk latte. The single I’m producing is pleasantly textured, very thin compared to my normal wool singles, with the occassional slub and noil (some are intentional) and I can’t wait to finish it all. The way it drapes seems much more natural than the ingeo.
First of all– it’s my birthday and I’m up at nearly 4 in the am trying to get my harddrive back to pre-infection condition. Which wouldn’t be so darned difficult if Windows ME didn’t come with a whole bunch of poohey. Yeah, I have stronger language in mind, but I’ll refrain– insert the nastiest noun that you can decently tolerate for the word poohey if you really must.
This would be much more fun if I had a cake to munch on.
And, I’m on my third day of a back attack. I can’t sit, I can’t stand, I can’t laydown, I don’t want to eat, and sleeping or feeling even remotely human is out of the question. At least trying to fix corrupted files has kept my mind focused on something other than my back.
You wanna know what started this? This is so stupid. Matt and I were talking about old movies (in particular sci-fi) and I said “You know what was a cool movies? That one where Tom Selleck is going after bad robots, what was that called… ‘runner’ something?” And Matt said “Oh, I know the one, he’s kind of a cop. What was that called?” so we typed it into google and up came a link that offered a videographical list of Tom Selleck in movies, he clicked on the link and it was a search page for another site–an infected page.
Nothing against google, it’s my start page for that matter, and the cache of the site actually had the real page before it was hijacked– the name of the movie? Runaway
I’m not sure that knowing the name of any Tom Selleck movie is worth the *(insert proper profanity here)* drama that looking for it caused.
Spinning up the silk latte from my sample pack.
I thought that the ingeo was slick stuff, this is quickly turning into my first frog hair thread although I’m spinning it on one of the same spindles that I use for spinning wool. Okay, so my frog hair isn’t as fine as most. My regular 2ply ends up being just a little thinner than the average commercial sock yarn and this stuff is about the same thickness as cotton crochet thread when doubled.
I’m also a little slow when it comes to catching on with proportions, this time– silkworms. I have a mulberry bush in the back yard that is about 11 feet tall. I want silkworms but read that it takes 10-20 bushes to feed them enough to produce a pound of silk. I held off on getting the eggs, figuring that I’d take some volunteers from the original bush and transplant them around the yard– I did *not* realize that most mulberry bushes are very small (about a foot wide by a foot and 1/2 tall). I have a 50+ year old mulberry tree.
Freecycle is the coolest. I signed up for my local freecycle yahoogroup and watched the emails for a while before jumping in and offering my Jetta. My little puff ball car has found a new home, where she’ll be pampered and loved and fixed up and driven around. She was inches away from being monster truck bait, I’m so happy.
I’ve gone back and forth between wanting to keep her (because I will be driving again someday) and wanting to get her out of my driveway. So knowing that the Jetta won’t just end up being junked and stripped out for parts is kind of nice. It’s silly to be so attached to a car, I know, but she’s a good little car.
Even though I didn’t post Matt’s Buick it’s going to a new home too. His divorce car. It’s a 1984 Rivera and would be kind of cool if we had the time to restore it, I can’t say that I’m sorry to see it go.
Then I asked for a highchair for Lexi– turns out the people taking my Jetta had one so they brought it by when they came to look at the car. Neato. It’s perfect too, since we have a tiny house, the new highchairs won’t fit and don’t collapse down to be stored when they’re not in use– where as this one is more like Josey’s old highchair. It’s exactly what I was looking for.
When they were here last night to look at the car, I found out that their son was just a little younger than mine, so I gave them a couple of Josey’s old coats (that are still really nice) that I couldn’t quite justify giving to Goodwill.
Then I found a new home for the stationary bike that we inherited, and now I find myself looking around the house going “Hmm… What else can we give away?” And then staring at the couches.
I don’t think I’m going to get new couches until I manage to get rid of the old ones. There were leather sectionals at Costco, but Matt was balking at the prices and he said he thought the color was ugly.
Okay, fine– I’m not buying fabric covered anything new until the kids are in college. So we’ll just have to keep shopping, and I’ll just have to keep covering our current furniture with quilts until then. That couch and love seat are embarrassing. I keep contemplating having them recovered, but the estimates I got are more than whole new furniture of better quality. I’ll pay to get our chairs recovered (look below at the picture of the wool and carding and you’ll see the chair I’m talking about, we have two of them) because those were only $5 and very solidly made. I might not have to have them recovered at all, but just cleaned– the fabric on those chairs is actually silk– so if I can get them cleaned properly I’ll do that before having them reupholstered.