Ceallach Dyes Too!

So some of you know that I have been working on the website for the business.

I am pleased to announce the Ceallach Dyes website is up and ready to go. So far we are PayPal only, but will soon be taking credit cards, as soon as I get all the pesky little details taken care of.

But in the meantime, I have also posted a link to the site over there to the right! Click through to the site and view the yarn pr0n shamelessly.

You know you wanna…..

I’m Hit!

I have been tagged. Thanks Janet!

I have to list my 7 favorite songs and then tag 7 other bloggers……

1. Amazing Grace-I find myself humming this one periodically. Not that I am religious, but just like the sentiment and the sound.

2. Star-Spangled Banner-It always makes me cry.

3. Hark the Heralds Angels Sing-again with the tears, and makes me hopeful a little.

4. Rowan song…..a Celtic song that my SIL taught me, it’s a lullaby that we sang to my daughter. We don’t know the real name.

5. The Lord’s Dance- heard it for the first time in Ireland, and love the sound and the feel and the idea that God sanctions dance as holy expression.

6. Adestes Fideles- my grandmother used to sing it at the holidays in Latin. She has a not nice singing voice, but that is not the point, is it?

7. Frere Jacques-I sang this to my son when he was a baby, and continued…..we still sing it together.

So there it is, and now I get to tag 7 bloggers……here goes: DillyDallyKnitter, OldLadyPenPal, Teleknitter, Civil Bitch, GianSavon, LeftCoastKnitter, Megalogarnie!

The Ends of the Earth

I have been to the ends of the earth…..no really, I have. Just not since the last blog entry, despite the rather long length of the hiatus since.

Not really the end of the earth, but three knittish friends and I went to Alameda, Ca to the store called Yarn! which is going out of business for a little sale shopping…..and I won the shopping prize, which means absolutely nothing except that I earned the respect and sympathy of my yarn-hunting peers. What did I get you may ask?

Hmmmm, several skeins of Waikiki, Cotton Chenille for facecloths (at least 3 skeins of which are for Mom), her last skein of SeaSilk in a green and bronze colorway, some MonkeyStix and Sweaters from Camp…..pictures later. Oh and a pattern for the Flower Basket Shawl for my little lost skeins of Koigu in the happy colors.

However, I can say that we have had a LeftCoastKnitter sighting. You all know Christine of course from a Yarn Encounter of Third Kind, but in the photo is Left Coast Knitter (she is on the left). Janet from Chocolate and Raspberries was also there, but declined to be photographed. (Actually it was more of a threat of dire consequences that utterly convinced us.)

Finally, I also have to say that I got my last package from the One Skein Angel…..she is a teacher in Maine, is totally sympathetic to the whole equal marriage rights thing and sent me this:

The next 3 photos are of the Debouilllet fleece that LeftCoastKnitter and I split years ago…..now this fleece has a story. We contacted the seller on eBay and asked about this fleece, which apparently was a 2 year cut…..because the normal bearer had managed to elude the shearer for at least one year. The bearer also lived and roamed freely in the New Mexico wilds and managed to pick up every cactus pine East of Arizona in the wool. The only way to recover the fleece is to comb it. Recently, on knitty, someone was looking for this breed….of course I put my hand up and sent two samples to the poster and an enthusiastic mod. They did have fair warning that the fleece had many prickly bits, but was quite lovely regardless.

Having retreived the fleece from the stash where it languished after being subjected to the last bits of some dye from a dye day with the aforementioned LeftCoastKnitter, I decided that I should start to comb it for spinning. That brings us to the first photo which is of the washed and dyed wool, unprocessed in its entirety.

The next photo is of me combing said fleece with my 2 pitch viking combs. Notice the long lusciousness that is the fiber. And here is a basketful of nests of combed fiber that is ready to be spun. I still have quite a bit of it to comb, having at least 9 ounces left to comb. All photo credits to Little Hill.Here is one of the California Golden Poppies from my yard. Little Hill and I spent the day taking photos in the backyard. The digital camera is excellent for letting him learn the basics of photo framin gand composition. Instant feedback with the little display allows young minds to absorb the information and what they are really doing. So I was giving him assignments to do, allowing me to comb to my heart’s content, and then check his work.

The student has apparently surpassed the teacher. At 6 years old.

That’s all for now.

Hmmmmmm….Dolores is busted!

I am a quiet blogger. I read any number of blogs, which I track through Bloglines and read them regularly. I rarely comment, especially on the blogs that have hundreds of readers, unless I really need to….I reserve my comments for those I know and love. I feel that the big blogs won’t miss my comments, such Panopticon (altho I followed Franklin’s forays into the Mediterranean, and its delights with delight), or Yarn Harlot, or Knit and Tonic. These folks don’t need my comments, which would likely be very much like everyone else’s comments. Their notoriety really speaks for itself.

Occasionally, though, as my ever so precious readers will note, I post a link to another blog for some reason, which may vary considerably. Usually because my comments are so voluminous in nature that I do not want to saddle someone else’s blog with them, or they are pivotal in nature.

Yeah, whatever.

Anyway, today Franklin posted the agreement with Dolores, about her behaviour. I particularly like the part about the services she renders in exchange for room and board.

Franklin, should Dolores get completely out of hand, I am sure that you could rent her out to other knitters for these services….of course, I could not afford a first class ticket, since every spare penny not spent on yarn is used to feed and clothe my two children. Poor Dolores would have to ride on the tailgate of a cow transport, instead.

Look it’s DillyDallyKnitter!

So this weekend, I met up with a friend of a friend, and we trekked down to Los Altos Ca to Full Thread Ahead for a fun-filled day of knitting content. There was a speaker scheduled at about 5, and so we did the natural thing, which was to get a tray of appetizers and margaritas at a local Mexican cantina, and visited the other yarn shop in town as well, wherein we met nona of nonaknits, completely randomly.

What was the knitting content, you may ask?

Well. Since you asked. This woman from Canada was going to be there, and she was going to talk about knitting….yes, I know, boring, right? I mean who talks about knitting to 300 people.

Well except that she was really funny…and did you know that she’s married to a record producer, isn’t that way cool!? Oh, and if you look really carefully, she is knitting a sock while 300 people watch and don’t realize it…..

Anyway, the knitty blogstalking assignment is celebrities, so here is my photo of me with dillydallyknitter, aka cpurl17 ala knittyboard. Isn’t she just the sweetest thing ever?

Oh, and the woman from Canada is there in the middle, I am just not sure why she got in the photo, but hey, they always tell you that you should be gracious, and odd numbers do make for better photos.

Besides, she signed my book….Thanks, Stephanie!

No LeftCoastKnitter sightings to report.

Hooky Friday!

Tomorrow is Friday!

Tomorrow is the day that we decided to play hooky, so that we can go to this…..Monet in Normandy

Little Hill is not going to school, and I am not going to work, so that we can go see MONET (insert ooh, ahhhs and ohhs here), wherein we will pack everyone in the van, probably after a good brekkie, and drive to the city to the museum and possibly have lunch at the Crab House on Pier 39.

I mean, it’s Monet!

And now for the obligatory knitting content….I cast on again for the corset top last night, and got the first row done correctly….and the shrug sleeve has been increased to 81 stitches of a necessary 100. Aren’t you happy for me??

Wherein we flash the tools of our trade…

As part of this week’s blog assignment, wherein we flash the tools of our trade, I am showing you my drawers. Please note that I have simply opened the drawers and snapped the photo, closing the drawer immediately thereafter so that no itinerant tool leaps out and runs for the door.

One of the sewing drawers…the one with the scissors….I am not acutally sure how many pair there are in there. I always watch carefully when I go into this one.

The tube with the straight needles….
The hardware tool drawer….no really it IS organized.
Flashing the closet.
More of the closet
And the other sewing drawer.

Arrgggg!

My pirate name is…..

Bloody Jenny Bonney

Every pirate lives for something different. For some, it’s the open sea. For others (the masochists), it’s the food. For you, it’s definitely the fighting. You can be a little bit unpredictable, but a pirate’s life is far from full of certainties, so that fits in pretty well. Arr!

Whatsa Knitting Me?

This is knitting me…… although mine is knit in a lovely dark blue with shaakdes of blue and green shadows….it calls for 4 skeins of Caron SoftShadows in Soft Merino.

Of course, this ain’t the only thing that is knitting me, I have also progressed on Icarus to the point where one can actually see the shawl, and I cast on for this corset top as well, and proceeded to completely destroy the lace pattern in 2 rows. Although I must say that the color used to display the top is HID-E-OUS. I am doing it in a royal blue.

I am now remembering why most of my knitting is mindless knitting, it’s because the rugrats make it hard to do anything else…….DOH! The lace pattern on the corset has the chart which is 4 rows….then they pattern tells you to do 3 repeats of the first 2 rows and then 3 repeats of this, and then 3 repeats of that……couldn’t they just chart all of it so that you can just follow the chart? The more I have to switch back and forth, the more likely I am to F— it up. Of course, the fact that Littlest kept running off with the pattern did NOT help.

So I guess I will have to redo the chart for myself. Again.

Knitting is out…or is it?

Thanks to Rachel Knitter on Knitter’s Review I am blogging this article:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6365952.html?pubdate=8%2F28%2F2006&display=current

You know, I think that things like knitting play a real role in society and that will grow as we have more and more integration of technology into our lives…..technology both makes things more accessible, and makes us want to do things not involving technology as an escape from it. (How many of us work on computers all day and then completely avoid them at night?) This will only increase as people start to see the tech as a tool, and not an end in and of itself….technology for technology’s sake will lead us nowhere, but applied tech is very hot!

I also think that at some point, any hobby reaches critical mass, and becomes so mainstream as to be above trends. With 53 million knitters in this country, I think we are almost there….especially with so many men knitting now, as well. Especially if the hobby is not some kind of aesthetic masturbation like much of the greater ‘arts’ scene, but actually serves a purpose, a function in our lives….providing us with entertainment, food for thought, epicurean delight, or warmth for the soul or body.

We are in fact seeing this kind of explosion on the handspinning side now….think pluckyfluff….there is a new kind of revival happening, as the knitters start to learn to spin. I predict a revival of weaving as a result of the spinning revival…..