twinset.us

Dear Readers,

Unless my twin has gone radical on me, someone is promoting their version of web freedom by hacking our site and adding a honkin’ big Stop SOPA button towards the bottom of the page.  I apologize, but I don’t have access to our page design to be able to remove it.  Jan is the web maven and is out of town, so let’s all hope she comes home soon and can get this straightened out.

In the meantime, here is a gratuitious kitten picture to distract you.

Cheers,

Ellen

Dear Ellen,

I’m surely having fun with my spinning wheel.  I’ve now got two lovely skeins of my own handspun worsted weight corriedale.  (I need to double check the WPIs, that’s an eyeball estimate.)  They are both from fiber from Desigknit — such gorgeous hews I loved watching the fiber turn into singles and then into the 3-ply yarn.   I’ve got ideas for them — I’m thinking a brioche stitch hat, maybe something like Nancy Marchant’s Delft’s Blauw.  It’s pretty sweet and I own the book — Knitting Brioche.  And I’m hoping I’ll have enough left for some simple mitts.  We’ll see.  In any case it will have to wait.  I have THREE sweaters on the needles right now.  Yep, three.

The first is the Ori-Mommy sweater that I’m co-knitting with Marie.  My part is now up to 57.5 inches long…about 14.5 inches to go.  She was making good progress on hers too, so we should have a sweater in the not terribly distant future.  Believe it or not, but I have really enjoyed working on this.  It’s basically K1P1 ribbing all the way.  Maybe I like it because I can drink and knit without worrying about forgetting the pattern.  Maybe it is the zen quality of the rhythm of switching back and forth between knits and pearls which I do find quite soothing.

The second one is called Manly.  I’m very pleased to be working on this one.  You see I have been eager to knit for Dale for sometime and he finally wants a sweater.  He did say he hoped it would be  a manly one though. So here we go — bulky wool in an almost olive drab…almost. It is really lovely with bronze and gold fibers that give it a nice heathery look. Brownstone is the perfect pattern, but I’ll be making it longer and adding some short rows in the back of the body to make sure it doesn’t creep up in back. He just hates that.

Finally, I’ve been eager to do some selfish knitting and this sweater I’m calling Fooling Around is the ticket.  It’s knit in Zealana Kauri Fingering, oh so soft with 60% New Zealand Merino, 30% possum and  10% silk.  The swatch bloomed beautifully and I know this will be very lightweight, but very snug at the same time.  The pattern is Pam Power’s Devonshire and has a beautiful lace inset in the back and along the edgest. I am so loving this knit and I never thought I’d want to knit a sweater in such a fine weight yarn.  Perhaps this will warm me up to try to start my Bohus.  Don’t hold your breath though — that sweater may have to marinate in stash for a while longer.

I’ve got some other fibery ideas for the coming year.  Remember that fungus?  It’s now drying on top of Allen’s Mini.  Sometime this spring I’m going to give a shot at using it as a dye base to see if I can’t get some oyster mushroom yarn out of it.  More to come on that one!

To wrap up last year I knit this little guy to guard my computer.  The kit to make him was in my holiday loot from Dale…my own knitted ninja.  Haiii-YA!!!

And finally, a quick report on 55 in 52.  I’m now down to 47 in 48.  I believe I can credit the fact that I’m preparing healthy options on the weekends so they’re ready to scarf down when I come home from work exhausted.  Yummy!

Hope your 2012 is going well!  Love, Jan

Dear Jan,

Again with the closure thing.  I should just get over not having gotten the time to do a holiday post, but I can’t let it go.  So, in the a-few-pictures-are-worth-a-few-1,000 words-but-can’t-really-capture-the-wonderful-holidays-we-had category, here are…

Both of our young ladies were able to be home. Chef-to-be Jenny prepped many vegetables for us as she practiced her knife skills.  You wouldn’t think that you’d need your potatoes cut in a 1/4″ dice if you were going to mash them anyway, but they certainly do cook quickly from that state.  Here she was just chopping onions, I am kicking myself that I didn’t take a photo of the stockpot full of perfect little cubes of potato.

Karen’s visit coincided with a visit from our mutual and dear friend, Cricket.

Wonderful holiday gifts appeared as if by magic under the tree - this wonderful Navajo spindle from our niece, Merry, symbolizes the joy.  Look, I already made yarn with it!

I realize my posts have been pretty fiber-light lately.  The yarn I spun on my new spindle is a start at correcting that, and I also worked on Rimfrost (aka Many Moments of Grace) over the holidays. Both sleeve caps are satisfactory now and I am working on the arms now.

We may be entering another dry spell, though, as last weekend I got started on an unbloggable project.  The yarn, 7 skeins-worth of Kidsilk Haze, is luscious to knit.  The only thing that worries me is that I have to have it knit by February 13.   I’ll try to find some sort of fibery pictures to distract you as I leave the blindfold on my actual knitting for the next few weeks.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Ellen

Dear Ellen,

It seems like we take turns hitting slowdowns in our web posting.  This time it was my turn.  I am barely caught up with my personal e-mail much less anything extra.  I think the new spinning wheel may be to blame.  As you can see, I have now produced some plied product.  This is DesignKnit fiber — a beautiful colorway in 100% corriedale.  I am satisfied with it, but not overwhelmed.  I do know I will get better. 

And it looks far better than it did!  This is how it appeared before I re-plied it.  Classic newbie error — I plied in the same direction as I spun.  To make it better, I sent it back through the wheel in the opposite direction, unplying and then replying each section as I went.  I also think it would have benefited from my not trying to 3-ply as my first wheel plying experience.

The singles weren’t that bad, but they were victims of two things –

1. I overspin.  I try not too, but I do.  I can go for short stretches where I manage to keep my feet from pumping away like crazy, but it doesn’t last…yet.  As a result my singles have lots of energy.
2. Erica had warned me that this fiber might have some felty bits in it and offered to refund my money.  I examined it (at the time) and couldn’t see anything I thought was felty.  When I actually opened the braid and got into it, I understood what she meant.  It does have a few felty bits.  I consider it a great way to learn and wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve also been busy with the farm…especially the wandering about admiring nature.  Here is our fungus tree with a new addition.  It is cool how absolutely round that hole is!  We have very accurate woodpeckers here.  And below is a shot of geese flying south for the remainder of winter.  I love listening to them call to each other and imagine the guy in the back is letting the guy in front know that he’s keeping up.  Either that or the guy in front is calling for someone else to spell him so he can take advantage of some drafting for a bit.  Look closely and you can see how hard they are flapping their wings!

All of Saturday was pretty much consumed by the Pennsylvania State Farm Show — the largest farm show in the country!

 We don’t just do princess torsos in butter…we do a whole cow…okay, calf.

There are many sheep…some in very cool outfits.

There are rabbits of many colors and varieties…though these will look pretty much alike on the dinner plate.  (Sorry, K & J, but these are the same breed your mom and I used to raise!)

Dale found a combine he wanted.  At least he wanted to go for a ride in it.

We decided to let sleeping hogs lie.

The youthful intensity of those entered in the poultry event was fun to watch.

I particularly appreciated the “stare ‘em in the eyeballs” method of inspiring greatness.  (No chickens were harmed during this competion despite the eery similarity to the way our special operations forces have been reputed to have killed goats.)

Finally, no good farm show could be without…alpacas.  I made several new friends — both four legged and two legged.  And came away with some beautiful rovings. 

Dale sized up the competition in the fiber arts and baking categories and says we can take them.  I can hardly wait.

Love, Jan

P.S. If you were wondering about the title of this post — that’s a goal of losing 55 pounds this year.  I want to be healthy for retirement!  Five down, fifty to go, so now I’m at 50 in 50!  I’m still 53 though.

Dear Ellen,

Christmas on the farm has been wonderful.  I didn’t get nearly as much done as I would have liked –it seemed like the time just flew by.  We did have a number of day trips during the week, so I’m sure that was a good deal of it.  We did do plenty of wandering about the farm.  Several of the dead trees have started producing a prodigious amount of fungi.  I guess to be accurate, the trees are only playing host to the organism, but still I’m impressed.

We got out solar power panels completed and laid in some pea gravel underneath.  We think we’ll also close off the sides and ends so we can use it to store all-weather gear like shovels and the wheelbarrow and such.  We’re producing more than we use already (okay, so the sun and the solar panels are producing it, not us actually), so from here on out we can say goodbye to the electric bill.  I’ll figure it out for sure, but I believe we are now carbon footprint negative on the farm.

One of the day trips that I made was back to DC where I sat with about 20 Navy women for Secretary Clinton’s unveiling of the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security.  She gave a very stirring speech and kindly pointed out that we were in the audience.  We had great seats, 6 rows back from the podium.  If you haven’t checked out the plan, I highly recommend it.  If we want a better world, we really need to encourage more women to be involved in making the decisions about it.

We also traveled to New York to see the girls and share a meal with them.  This, of course, was the scene of the great Marshall Chess Club caper.  I can’t believe I didn’t get a picture of Jenny while we were with her.  She was, as always, a delight to be with.  She even got Dale to try some vegan food after we pulled off the heist.

With great relief I finished knitting Marie’s Christmas socks just in time to block them and take them on the trip so they could find their way under their tree.  Socks for Heidi were there too.

On Christmas Eve we made the trek to State College to take Dale’s mom to dinner and share gifts with her.  She got the Foggy Coast cardigan I’ve been working on…and seemed to like it very much.  It fit her great!

Two of our Santa surrogates (you and Chris) evidently thought we needed a little more of the birds and the bees.  Chris gave us this awesome birdhouse…the copper roof goes so well with our porch roof.  We put it in the side garden right next to the turret.  And you (of course you know this, but someone else might be interested) gave us this very cozy bee house.  We’ll place it out in the treeline where we get some great wildflowers and hopefully we’ll get a little colony going there.

Dale was a VERY nice Santa too.  He got me some very nice things (like the tee shirt I’m wearing while I type this — “Think Globally.  Act within local variable scope.”  Show it to your favorite programmer.  he will probably love it as much as me.) and I was very, very content.  Then he told me to close my eyes.  When I was allowed to open them a Kromski Sonata was sitting in front of me.  Talk about a surprise!  Picture me (the one without a single wheel spinning lesson) spending the rest of the day figuring it out.  I used pencil roving to do the bobbin full of the purpley-greenish-blue single.  I realize this is the “slice and bake” of spinning, but it gave me a good shot at getting used to treadling.  Then I played with two scraps of roving that a friend had given me when she was trying to get me to try spindling.  The yellow worked out very nicely.  The maroon was thicker, but still pretty even.  It was very sticky and I couldn’t get it to draft for anything.  Can certain dyes affect the slickness of the fiber?  I noticed when spindling the fiber optic fiber that the dark blue was more troublesome than the other colors in that braid.  Of course, I have no clue what the fiber was — may not have been a new spinner’s friend.

So we had a great Christmas.  Especially Ruby who got many extra treats and then snoozed under the tree.  I trust yours was wonderful as well…and that you are enjoying the family and friends who have come to Minneapolis for the holidays.  Wish them all well for me too!

Love, Jan