As The Yarn Turns

Spinning Again

I finally got back to spinning today. During the holidays, the Christmas tree was sitting in the spot where the spinning wheel usually sits. I didn't really have another good place for it, so spinning took a back seat to other things. Even once the wheel was settled back in its old spot, I seemed to forget about the wheel. I even carded up some wool with every intention of spinning it, but that just never happened. So today I pulled out some of my comfort wool, blue-faced leicester. I learned to spindle spin with blue-faced leicester. It's still my favorite and always easy for me to spin. So today I pulled off a long length and settled into spinning. It's just plain, undyed white fiber but oh so wonderful and a pleasure to spin.

I don't really have any plans for the yarn; I just needed to spin. Usually I tend to spin without enough regard to consistency from spinning session to the next. That's okay until I need to go to the next skein. They are not always as consistent from skein to skein as I would like. This time I thought I would try to be a little more consistent. That's why there is a strand of yarn hanging on the left side of the flyer. It's my general thickness guide. On the right side of my flyer is the wrist distaff I made. Oh and yes that really is a Mr. Potato Head pillow behind the spinning wheel.

After this past week, I seriously needed play time. The Art Zone at the National Gallery of Art web site fit the bill perfectly. I started with the Collage Machines, an online collage tool.

The SwatchBox looks like nifty tool for trying out color combinations, especially for dyeing. You can even make a Virtual Mobile. It was a fun site to explore when my brain was mostly mush.

by Sydney  |

Still Here

I'm still alive. We've just been up to our eyeballs in computer problems here at Doctordirt Central, including needing to take down the blog several times during the past week. So if you tried to get to it and couldn't, that was the problem. We have a server here that has been a reliable workhorse for many years. It's been getting old though, and needed an upgrade. We just kept putting it off because of all of the work involved. When it started having problems last week, we decided it was the perfect time for a spur of the moment upgrade. Upgrading servers just aren't that much fun. There seem to be a million things that need to be set up and a million more that go wrong and leave you scratching your head. After one all nighter and another night with very little sleep, we are almost back to normal. Plus many of our customers have needed work done on their networks so we've been busy. I'm okay with busy as long as I have some down time now and then. Besides you're probably lucky I wasn't posting to my blog because my brain was mush. It's still half mush now.

The nice thing about upgrading computers is that you have time to knit while you're waiting for software to install or waiting for the computer to reboot or while you're waiting for whatever to finish doing its thing. I didn't get as much knitting done as I wanted, but I did make some good progress on the Gentleman's Socks.

Now that I'm further along, I really like these socks. I'm so glad I got the extra ball yarn, otherwise I wouldn't have made the stripes on the heels and I wouldn't have picked up that ball of blue yarn. I'm not sure if you can see it in the picture, but the blue picks up the bit of blue in the main color. It's a classy combination.

Now I should be able to take a breath and do some planning for Project Spectrum.

by Sydney  |