You spin me right round baby..........

This is the result of 2yrs. worth of research. As a small girl we would go visit a friend of my parent's whose whole family collected antiques. My favourite thing to do was to sit at her spinning wheel & get it to spin. Aunt Peggy would then hand me the carders & let me brush out the lamb's fleece. She didn't spin herself, but did have a small amount of fibre on hand for displaying along with the wheel.

I then would dream of what it would be like to learn to spin. A few years ago, I found out that one of our Quilt Guild members was a spinner; this motivated me to start pondering the topic once again.

At first I was shocked to find out the cost of the wheels & therefore knew that I had better be sure of what I wanted before I made a purchase. Every once in a while I would search the internet for wheels, spinning info. etc. The urge to get one got so strong last Christmas that I finally broke down, throwing caution to the wind & making my purchase on a newly acquired credit card (no lectures please).

I had decided on the Kromski Sonata for a number of reasons, the final being a review that I read on CraftyGrrrl.ca. She had just boughten one herself & talked about a deal that Coppermoose had going where you got the $120- bag for free when you ordered the wheel. It was still on when I checked the site so I ordered it.

It only took 2 wks. to arrive & when it did, I dragged my Flu-like body down to the Post Office to pick it up. In Pj's, winter coat, no make-up & armed with a box of kleenex & Ny-Quil, Mary (the post master) was there to greet me & she totally understood. She's a sewer & mail-order junkie & said she would have done the exact same thing. Pictured below is the pkg. just taken out of the box.

The wheel is attractive, smooth & I love it. There's probably some better ones out there, but for the price & compactness (not to mention the bag), I am very happy.


The picture below is of my first handspun. I got the roving from Lane's End. Lynn (lanesend "AT" cycor "DOT" ca) didn't have a lot of dyed ones to choose from because she hadn't done her dying for the new season yet, but I did manage to get this green one & the pink/purple/blue one below. They're both 30 Mohair/70 Cotswold blends; very nice to work with.


The next picture is a handspun containing Angelina Fibres. I am a distributor for them here & just had to try blending some into a roving. Not wanting to mess with the dying pattern, I broke off the bits in colour sequence, carded in the Angelina & then put back in the sequence to be spun. A lot of work, but the results were lovely. I think the sparkle is probably difficult to see from the picture, but trust me it's wonderful.


Anyway, part 2 coming soon. Peace out, Boop

"The Cure" & other stuff

This is a pillow that I designed & made last month for a dear friend who is going through breast cancer. I am happy to say, she is going to beat this thing. We are all still sending her our thoughts & prayers (because the rest of the treatment is upcoming), but we're all very optimistic & like "The Harlot" would confirm: "never underestimate the power of knitters"(especially when they're on your side).
The basic idea came from a book called Creative Kindness by Nancy Zieman with Gail Brown. The shape had been thought of by a nurse who realized how perfectly this would fit under the arm & add support to the areas where it was needed most.



I got our machine knitting group to sign pieces of cotton (with a pigma pen) so I could heat set them & sew them on the back as a reminder to the recipient of how much we all cared.

This scarf project came from the same machine knitting group (I believe that it was Shirley that did program that month). It is done on the LK150 with sports weight yarn; tuck stitch butterfly pattern.
Well, hope this is good enough for now. I have a couple of big blog entries coming up on spinning. Until then:

Peace out, Boop

Been Hacked

No pics this post 'cause well, it just wouldn't be appropriate. Yesterday I received a message from a confused & worried mother (my own) wondering if I had checked the comments section on my own personal web site (not this blog). Most wouldn't check the link, but it is under the "home base" tab on the blog's right hand side.

Needless to say, upon following my own link, & checking out the comments on the knitting poll & site, I was disturbed to find out that I had been hacked (badly). Fortunately we have word moderation on the Blog (& this is the very reason we do), but the web site itself does not.

There were a total of 39 comments (20 for the poll & 19 for the site in general) describing (in albeit way too much detail) ways to enhance, embrace, excite, etc. all of your body parts & those of anybody else in your life for that matter.

It wouldn't even allow me to sign in & admin the site until I went to my actual web host & cleared the data from there. Once deleted though, it only took a few hours until they were right back at it. The only thing I could find out about the culprits (since their IP addy wasn't real) was that they were Chinese & most likely doing this from overseas. Although I'm sure this would attract a new & different sort of client base, I decided it was best to take the official site off-line for the time being.

The blog itself appears to be fine. If you're one of those who would like to comment, but just doesn't want to go through the word verification process, I apologize, but for now this is definitely something that I won't change; obviously it's needed, lol.

Peace out, Boop