Sunday, June 28, 2015

A marathon with interruptions

Yesterday I decided that I would keep on spinning until I finished Bobbin 4 of the Colourway Quoth the Raven.  It is 50% silk and 50%  superfine merino, spins fine and if I don't put enough twists in it  -  it breaks.  I have two more braids to spin ... but not yet and I have returned, with some relief to spinning Blue Faced Leicester.  I am intending to ply this lot of BFL with a solid colour, along with two other colourways from the MEGASAL forum on Ravelry.com which I also intend to ply with semi-solids.


I spun from about 2.00pm until I finished at 10.00pm but had a fairly eventful day of it.  Firstly, Parsifal (who else) managed to upset a mug of tea all over me, the table, my spinning chair and the floor.  By some miracle Roberta and my spinning were spared and after I had dried everything off I was able to resume my Quoth.


The next interruption was from D2 who is off to England in a couple of days and who had asked me to look after a couple of her classic cars.  I gave her the sensor to get the first of the cars into the secure area only to have her phone me to say that she couldn't find my parking bays.  I went down to Level 4 but there was no sign of her so I realised that she had probably gone to Block A's secure parking.  I trundled over there, rescued her and directed her to Block B's car park.  She managed to bring the second car up without any more input from me and I showed her how to exit the 'cage'.  She arrived with coffee and cake from downstairs and then I went back to my spinning.


I am going to get enormous street cred from the cars  -  a mauve classic VW and a red classic Porsche.  They will get dusty and probably drip oil but they are very pretty.


My spinning is going much faster now that I am back with wool fibre and I think that I have spun about a quarter of  the first braid.  I seem to be collecting a great deal of spun yarn and will end up with a great number of sweaters eventually.  I don't know what I am going to do with the silky stuff; I bought enough to knit a sweater but I think that it will be too soft and fine unless I can find a drapey sort of pattern.  But that is low priority  -  I have worked out that it takes a minimum of 24 solid hours of spinning to make a skein of Quoth and I am feeling in need of a break from it.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Key words??

Blogger is suggesting that I should register key words for Google's search engine so that more people will discover and read my blog.  I thought about it for about ten seconds and decided that "Spin, Knit, Cats" are not the sort of key words which will attract a great deal of attention so I haven't rushed to put any in.  "Pussy" and "Picking up" might bring in a few readers but perhaps not the sort I  would welcome and I feel that they might be disappointed when they arrive and read my perfectly innocent comments on a pair of very spoilt felines and my frustrations with spinning 50% silk and how long it is taking me because 200gms gives me about 600 yards plied and washed which translates to almost 2,000 yards of singles before shrinkage.  I will spend the next week finishing off Skein 4 of 'Quoth' and then diverge into something different before I do the last two skeins of 'Quoth the Raven'.


I took the cats over to Zoo this morning and Parsifal immediately checked out the cat furniture before moving onto the feeding bowls.  I can't believe that he is hungry; maybe he thinks that some new dishes would liven up his rather uninteresting life.  I have decided that after this pair of cats I will foster older cats as I am probably too old to be able to outlive another pair of kittens and the Cat Haven needs foster parents ... but that is hopefully at least ten years down the track.


We finally, after almost four years, have a full house on Level 7.  One of the apartments has been empty and unsold up until just a few weeks ago and the new owner is moving in by degrees.  The lower levels are mostly unknown territory and a number of the apartments down there are rented so it is a bit of a shifting population.  Block A is, I gather, only about half full at the moment.  There is a new block of apartments almost finished across the highway and the Government is building another 900 just over the railway line.  The Media tells us that there is a housing crisis with prices far too high but when all this building is finished I think that it might be a buyers market.  Claremont is a nice place to live, but ...

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Straw into Gold Mk.2

Yesterday Herself and I did our second and third spinning demonstrations.  I had ruthlessly greased and oiled Ertoel Emma, my treadle wheel and she is now working a great deal better.  Added to that we had more time than we had for any of our previous demonstrations but I still overspun shamelessly as though the devil was after me, forgetting what we were told when, in the very olden days, D3 and I attended spinning lessons (that was in the days before Internet and very much before U-Tube) "slow treadle to spin and go like the clappers when plying".


However, the audience was very uncritical except for one little boy who took one look at Emma and said to me, 'I know what that is for; it is to make gold.' I told him that I was sorry but I wasn't able to make gold on Emma.  "Ah," he said, "then it makes straw".


I am not sure where he got his information from; Herself is intending to tell the class the story of Rumplestiltskin next week  and I doubt if the woes of Eros and Psyche is a fit story for six-year-olds.  I can't recall any other straw-to-gold stories offhand but most fairy stories I discovered myself so I could have missed some.  My family was more into Winnie the Pooh, Little Ragged Blossom and the big bad banksia men (Snugglepot and Cuddlepie by May Gibbs for non-Aussie readers).


Talking of fairy stories, my American nephew-in-law has just discovered the existence of drop bears, a strictly Australian phenomenon.  There is a great deal about them on the internet but basically they are a kind of Koala which lurks in trees and, with all fangs and claws exposed it drops onto the heads of unlucky tourists and rips them  up in a rather hostile way.  As I understand it, they prefer Scandinavian tourists but all trekkers are advised to speak with an Australian accent and avoid walking under trees.


Edited to add that hearsay suggests that a smear of Vegemite behind the ears may act as a drop bear repellent.