sara skates

So I moved to bigger nicer digs at work recently, complete with new furniture.  So there’s a bit of motivation to dress up the room…I have these storage cabinets on the wall that are about as tall as an average sized adult – so there’s a shelf space on top.  While pondering what to put up there, I toyed with vintage fibery tools – but the old hand carders that I have an a few old weaving bobbins just didn’t cut it.  Then I thought a brilliant thought – to check my doll collection.

While I was growing up, one of my grandmothers traveled a lot – all over the world, and a couple of substantiai trips a year.  They’re all in three wall display cabinets from IKEA – rather stuffed in there.  My eyes lighted on a doll from Greece – she’s holding a distaff and she’s spindling yarn.  I looked through the rest of them and found a number with fleece and fiber connections:

Apologies for how dark it is…

The individual dolls:

They are: 

Greek woman with distaff and spindle; Mexican weaver; guy with woven shawl (not sure where he’s from), Native American woman with papoosed baby and interesting textiles – I especially like her skirt and the woven ribbon around the baby bundle; woman with papoosed twins – one up each sleeve – and little balls of yarn decorating their heads as well as her dress; Trio of women from Peru I think – two spindling, and one plying I think.

There’s another guy up there who has nothing to do with fiber but I just like him and he complements the bunch in style and texture. He is hand-carved from a piece of wood – I haven’t a clue where he’s from.

The rest of the office is still pretty much a mess – clever of me to avoid photographing the piles

What’s a boy to do when Moms only bought one pair of snowpants which have been left at school and there’s beautiful snow to play with?

First, said boy gets bunded up to go outside anyway – in regular pants.  That lasts about 3.5 minutes.  Then, Tobes came inside and suggested that we put snow in the tub upstairs.

What a great idea!

Hannah joined in a few minutes later, and as near as I can gather (from conversation emanating from the bathroom), they were building snow-pokemon characters.

I joined Cece and Amanda’s Stash and UFO Bust Along – a three month commitment to not buy new yarn (I’m adding fleece to that) and to knit from the stash and/or finish WIPs.  And – to flash your stash.  I won’t flash the whole thing in this post- but here’s a start:

There’s the shelf o’ mostly handspun; a shelf of stuff waiting to be spun; a box of sock yarn; and a box of lace-weight yarn (with some sock and laceweight yarn sitting on top).  Upstairs (not yet photographed), there’s a wardrobe full of yarn, and a half a closet full of fleece.

Active WIPs include both spinning and knitting.  A list of knitting WIPs:
*YarnPlay’s Poppy – I am a few inches away from being done with the body, the sleeves are next.
*Clapotis – it is probably halfway done, and it has been in time out for some time.  I somehow keep losing a stitch with every repeat…I haven’t a clue where, I have counted and written down rows as I progress and it makes no sense.  I’m slightly worried that it seems to be growing at an incorrect slant.  I should just block it on the needles and see…
*A pair of socks out of Fleece Artist yarn.  One toe needs to be knit, and then minimal grafting of both toes.
*A multidirectional scarf out of some funky noro yarn. 
*My first lace attempt – a Lilly of the Valley irritating bobbly but pretty thing
*Two sweaters for Terry – I really need to finish at least one of these in the forseeable future
*probably some other stuff that I am forgetting.

But – my first finished thang – 1242 yards of two-ply romney:

That’s from a formerly huge bag of over 3.5 pounds of fleece…All done. 

What to knit with it is the question!

Perhaps this will be a new randomly-populated blog category…

*When reading a bedtime book of facts about guinea pigs to Toby, and the last page is about the lifespan of guinea pigs (and thus when they die), don’t tackle the topic of cremation when Toby asks "Mama, how did Patrick become a flower?" (Patrick the doggie was put to sleep last spring, apparently Toby had had a conversation with Terry earlier that day about what happens when animals die.)  If you do, it’ll be a very long after-lights-out conversation.

Duh.

*It’s no secret that I knit tightly.   At my last conference, I had the usual sock-on-needles with me, and ended up at a bar with a couple of other knitters – where I was teased (it was ok, not in a bad way) re. whatever connection there is between my choice of profession and my tight anal knitting process, I said to myself "I can so too knit less tightly" and I proceeded to do so on the present sock.  In the dark.  Upon arrival back in my hotel, I had an inch and a half or so of the calf at a distinctly different gauge.

DUH.

*When blogging from home on a snow day and distracted, and your sweetie asks if she can close out your blog-post-in-progress window, you say yes as you have set the publishing date to be later that night.  But have you saved the post in question?  No.  It’s gone when you log on again later.  Duh…

*When blogging-in-your-head before bedtime, if you don’t take notes you will undoubtedly forget fascinating components of a blog entry.  Say it with me now….

Duh.

Feel free to contribute your own examples.  I’m sure I have more.

We typically don’t see many movies or performances – but we have seen some great ones in the last month.  We went to see Happy Feet on Christmas Day – and were treated to our very own private viewing of it (no one else was in the theatre).  It was great – Toby held on to the seat backs from the row in front of us, and cruised up and down the aisle – he was rocking out to the rhythm and tunes.

Last night we saw Bugs Bunny on Broadway, a performace by the Rochester Philharmonic, conducted by it’s creator George Dougherty.  It was really quite fun – a series of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, with the live orchestral music to boot. 

And we have seen Shut up and Sing not once, but twice.  Neither Terry nor I were particularly tuned into the Dixie Chicks before seeing the movie – I mean, we were somewhat aware of the controversy that hit the press, and we knew a few of their songs (as we live far North enough in the US that our radio stations have not banned their songs).  But – the movie is phenomenal.  It’s truly worth seeing – we’ll mostly likely buy a copy of the DVD once it is released.  We have rounded up copies of most of their CDs to boot at this point – and we are listening to their newest one whenever we’re in the car.  Taking the Long Way is one of those great powerful CDs – as Terry says, there’s nothing better than music by angry women!

This is what I’ve been doing a lot of since the week off from work between Christmas and New Years:

That’s over 600 yards of two-ply romney.  From a fleece I picked up at Cummington last year sometime I think, from Elihu Farm.  I had it processed by the fab guys from Wooly Knob – who wash dirty fleece and make a super nice roving – which needs very little preparation before spinning.  I tug it out just a bit, and it’s ready to go.

The two right-hand skeins make me particularly happy:

as I am settling in to figuring out this wheel – it’s niiiiicccccceeeeee.   This is my first real experience with a double drive wheel – it took me a bit to sort out tension and things like that – but the last few bobbins have been sweet.  None of these skeins are washed yet – they’ll look even nicer after that.

I am not nearly done with the bag of romney – there are yards and yards to be spun yet.  It started out as a 5.5 pound fleece – I can’t vouch for how much came back after processing, but it was a pretty big bag. 

However, I will say that this is the first time I have set to spinning a vast quantity of a particular fiber.  Usually, I have 2-6 ounces of something, I spin it up, add it to the shelf o’ pretty wool in the living room, and occasionally knit a hat or set of mittens from it.  This will be a sweater of some kind…  And at this rate, it won’t even take me too many more weeks  to be done with spinning.  A visit to Cate and Rhys is on the agenda, so I’m spinning whenever possible, and not knitting much.  (Though I have knit at movies, and I grafted the toes and wove in the ends of three pairs of socks the other night – my toes are now quite toasty and fashionable!).

My office at work is being painted today (dang, I can’t go in to work…), but I’m pretty sure a skein of this is going in to be a  desk accessory – to be patted frequently throughout the day.

Toby has come home from school a few times talking about a particular topic or book as "fact" not fiction.  His latest focus has been bats:  For the last few trips to the library, he has brought home books about bats.  So bedtime reading has been all about bats lately – and ALL the books that he has chosen are factual books – full of photos and info about different kinds of bats and bat behavior.  He tells us all about echolocation, and he is intrigued with the fact that bats are mammals (their babies drink milk) and he finds it hysterical that he is a mammal too.  (He really would like to still have the mommy milk bar open, but that closed a few months before his 4th birthday – at a time when I had morphed into a "toy" rather than a source of food.)

So we are reading last night’s book, and it’s an "I Can Read!" book which Toby liked because *he* could read it to me (instead of vice versa).  However it didn’t have much focus on details (or words like ‘echolocation’) so his attention started drifting.  Meanwhile, Hannah had meandered in to share the story reading – and she mentioned a few times that hey!  We could read Stellaluna!  Since that was a great story about a bat too.  I told her to go find it on the bookshelf, and we could read it too (or maybe stop part-way through the simpler fact book).

She found it – and I suggested to Tobes that we switch gears and finish the I Can Read! one the next night.  He took one look at Stellaluna and exclaimed:  "But THAT is not about facts, it’s FICTION" with some serious disdain in his voice.  Like who on EARTH would want to read that – when it wasn’t Real Information.  (I then leafed through Stellaluna, and decided it had WAY too much text to do last night anyway – it was already past bedtime).  So we finished the simpler (but factual) book, and turned off the lights and got in bed.

The last bits of pre-sleep converstation went something like this.  "Mama, why would anyone want to read FICTION anyway?"  He was totally grappling with what the heck the appeal of a not-real story could be.  Of course I expanded ad nauseum re. how imagination is really cool, and stories like that are great to listen to, etc.

But what I find so funny is how distinctly different the kids are in this respect.  Hannah has ALWAYS been about the story and discourse of something.  Before she had any words in her language, she carried on big long babble conversations – her language learning started at the discourse level.  She would stand at the top of the landing (we lived in a split level house at the time), and tell us big babble "stories" – complete with hand gestures and you could just hear the voice switches from one character to the next – like what "speech bubbles" do in print.  And to this day what floats her boat are stories and imagination and creating these worlds of characters and events.

Toby started utterly and completely at the single word level.  He comes home from school and tells us all this micro-level detail about the school day – stuff we *never* heard about with Hannah.  What floats his boat is the actual, real factual data.

And what’s funny is how utterly similar that is to his genetic make-up. My father is an absolute dear of a guy – but he’s totally an engineer "data, give me the data" kind of guy.  Me, well, suffice it to say I’m a data analyst for much of the day.  Hannah and Terry – they *thrive* on stories – the more embellished the better.

Terry and I were in hysterics last night about this latest fact/fiction episode.  I suspect we’ll start bombarding Tobes with bat STORIES for a bit just to torture him   Don’t get me wrong, he loves a good story too (and specializes in telling and re-telling ones he finds particularly funny), but fact/fiction discussions will continue for some time I bet.