Daydream believer

Well, I used the fact that the baby took a nap this morning to absolutely waste my time web-surfing. I'm a bad SAHM. Of course, as soon as I began to type, the sound of keys clacking woke the baby, which only proves that I should have been more idle.

Anyway, I found the most beautiful shawl when I arbitrarily clicked someone's blog link on the Spindler's email list:



(The shawl pattern is for sale here.) I need a new project like I need a hole in the head, and I actually spent a moment contemplating handspinning some alpaca for this. Sometimes I just have to laugh at myself. I can't even finish mattress-stitching a sweater that's already half sewn up!

The blogger I found is Taueret, who I have now added to my RSS feed. I need to be careful about finding interesting knitting blogs though, I used to have quite a habit. She also cracked me up with a "look at the hideous/funny photos from my vintage pattern books" post. I think the picture speaks for itself:



Pure wool softened with a mist of mohair, then hardened with a double barrel of buckshot! The sweater's not bad, but the pose is priceless.

There must be something of the eternal optimist in me, because even in these "hideous old pattern" books, I always seem to find something I think would look nice knitted up in a color I like, etc.

When I saved that picture to post it here, I titled it "shotgun handknits," which is ironic because having a shotgun pointed at me is probably the only way I'm ever going to finish any of my WIPs. Maybe I'll post a copy of this pic in my craft room as motivation, and psych myself up that this chick will come after me if I don't have a sweater done SOON.

Looking at that picture made me think of buckshot jeans. I don't recall where I heard about them, probably some kind of "weird news" story or something.

That's it for today, the baby is getting cranky.

"Ruler" Folding Madness

I found this post on Happy Zombie via Nutmeg's Material Mama podcast, as well as her posts about it on the Sewing Mamas forums (registration required).

Although the tutorial calls for using a quilting ruler to fold, I decided to use something larger because I don't quilt, thus had lots of pieces that were several yards long. Once they were folded over the ruler they were too thick to fold in half. I settled on using two of those portfolios that hold a pad of paper.

I also used the folding as an opportunity to catalog my fabric stash for some bizarre reason. Maybe I'm nesting. Anyway, it was easy to add a step of measuring the fabric, since I already had to smooth it out and fold selvedge to selvedge, and since I cleared the living room to do it, I was right by the computer anyway.

Here are my before pics, a wreck of a craft room after about a week of just opening the door and throwing things in:



I took a "before" shot of the shelves and closet where I store my fabric, but now I can't remember where I saved it.

I've been folding here and there whenever I find the time - usually about a dozen pieces or so each time. I'm up to 160+ yards, and the end is nowhere in sight!

New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival

This weekend I got to spend my first Mother's Day as a mother at the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, as opposed to last year, when I went during a torrential downpour.

First things first, we went straight in to cheer on our friends participating in the Sheep-to-Shawl competition. There were very few participants, in fact there was only one adult division team and one kids' team. It was a shame, since that meant there wasn't really any competition, other than against the clock. Of course the kids won the people's choice award, but I voted for the adult team anyway, since I knew some of the participants, and they really went all out with themed costumes and a "mad tea party" setup, as well as battling some serious loom issues. Here's a picture of them removing their shawl from the loom:



I wish I had gotten a shot of the kids weaving on their hand-made loom which was built from giant pixie stix containers, but there were a lot of people around their team's area when I was there and I didn't try too hard to get a shot.

I got a lovely partial Cormo Romney cross fleece from This & That Farm. Last year I hit my budget limit before I got to their booth, but they had some lovely fleeces, and my friend who was with me (and has a larger fiber budget) bought a hogget fleece from them. After seeing how lovely her fleece was, and the sample they sent her this year, I made it a point to seek them out. And this year I really had to, since they didn't have much fleece left by Sunday. I bought 2 1/2 pounds of fleece from a sheep named Connor:



Then I got an awesome black alpaca fleece, unfortunately I don't remember the name of the guy's farm since it wasn't very prominent in his booth as far as I can remember, so I'll have to ask my friend Kelly. I'll probably come to find that his name was plastered everywhere and I was just oblivious.

We had a late lunch, in which my husband got a lovely shot of me chewing. This was just before the baby tried to grab and eat the book.



Pardon the color adjustment, my husband never looks at the camera settings and this picture originally had me looking very much like Violet Beauregard, pre-juicing.

I also got some lovely soft angora from Chris of Woolybuns. She was very nice and now that I see her blog it will definitely be on my "to read" list. We hit her booth at the end of the day when I reviewed our day and found we had skipped a building, so I didn't get to see any cute bunnies since they were all gone by the end of the day, except one who had had enough of the crowds.

Of course my raw fleece buying led to my digging out several other bits of raw fleece I've accumulated, and now my craft room is even more trashed than usual:



Anyway, I dug out 3 pounds of what I *think* is Romney, but I can't remember since it wasn't labeled. I decided to scour this first. This stuff was REALLY dirty. The below pic was taken after 3 washings and a few rinses. The tips really had the dirt locked in. I'm going to let it dry a bit and tease the tips open before washing again, and after reading a bit online, I'm going to use a ridiculous amount of Dawn next time.



Also after reading a bit online last night about the problems I was having scouring the Romney, I learned that I'm probably ruining my septic system by scouring fleece in the washing machine. Don't tell my husband. So now I need to go out and get some five-gallon buckets.

Whew! I need to blog more often if only to avoid insanely long posts like this one. There's much more, but I'll save it for later since the baby has had enough of me spending time at the computer.