(”How ’bout this, too?” asked A Child Who Shall Remain Nameless.

“No, I don’t think so!” from Nancy in tandem with my “Not on your life!”)

Nancy, who is in the process of selling her house and has been busybusybusy, came over today anyway, to my great delight. I’m clearly doing better than I was, thank goodness, but I warned her about my cold, fever gone or no. (Hey, anybody want a house in Mountain View with a beautiful indoor courtyard? Her turtle swam with the fishies in a fountain in there for many many years.)

While trying to stage her house, she’s also a co-chair running CNCH (a Stitches West-type event for handweavers) and she’s teaching handspinning classes. Hey! I had some Romney roving that needed a home: Romney is one of the best wools for teaching new spinners with, not too short but not rough like some of the longer wools, but I am no longer a beginner and I like my wool softer than that.

(Side note here before Don asks: roving is the term for fiber that has been washed, carded, and if need be dehaired of any coarse outer coat and removed of any hay the animal might have rolled around in and is now ready to be spun into yarn.)

A solution could be found here, don’t you think? And so off it went with her, freebie supplies for her students to make everybody happy.  Then I threw in a nepped-at-the-mill (not on purpose!) Rambouillet fleece for extra practicing on.  The Boy Scouts had gotten a large bagful for stuffing in their shoes on long hikes to avoid blisters; now the second bag had a good use.

Although, I did spin one good project out of that Rambouillet years ago; its tested micron count was very fine and it was such soft stuff.  It was half-felted as well as pilled by the time it came back to me (the mill I sent it to bought better superfine equipment after that learning experience), and though it was like trying to spin rubber bands, it did make for very soft, cushy slippers that I knit up for my daughter’s high school biology teacher.

That teacher’s name was one of two on the bio textbook.  She was so inspiring in that classroom that she changed my daughter’s life entirely.  Handspun handknitted slippers as a thank you for my daughter wanting to walk in her shoes was the least I could do.  And that was based on what I knew then.

Sam’s finishing up her microbiology PhD now.   I hope her old teacher knows that Sam not only tried her shoes on, she loved the fit.

For those who wanted to know what I was listening to Thursday night, thanks to KDFC’s website, I found it; it’s Jonathan Biss (I read it as “Bliss” the first time, too funny) and his album is here.

I got a surprise package today from Cathy, who’s been ill herself, but here she was, thinking of me instead.

And from Anniebee. And Margaret. Julie. Stephanie. Kimberly. Ruth. Wishing me well on recovering from my last surgery, with cards, hot cocoa, dark chocolate (Cathy), handmade stitch markers (Ruth), the best use of a stray bit of dyed wool I’ve ever seen on Margaret’s card, and a handbeaded coin purse, sachets, a Canadian maplewood bookmarker, and a handknit pearled (spelled that right) flower pin from Anniebee.  My goodness. Thank you! To that I guess I owe a how-I’m-doing, which is very well overall. I did lift a 25 lb bag of birdseed Saturday and realized that I might want to wait just a little longer on that; I was testing my scars to see if I’m up to using my heavy dyepot yet.  It’s been a year since I made dye out of my fading amaryllis flowers, and I am antsy.  The answer would be, honestly, not quite yet. But close!

And in the random findings department.  Sometimes some things (this is their photo) just grab your attention. Like a hand (partly) -spun  handmade wool wedding dress and groom’s vest from the bride’s Lincoln Longwool sheep. Note that this is not a soft-haired breed; this is the sturdy stuff they make carpeting out of.  Honey, just don’t let him walk all over you.  I do love the effect of alternating solid locks with fluffy, whiter slightly-pulled-apart ones, and clearly it’s all been solidified and felted a bit by washing, but I gotta tell you–she got fleeced.

Little Bo Peep, did she lose any sleep over whether she’d be dragging her veil behind her?

But once you get pasture initial reaction, hey, clearly, they’re having a good time: already raising a little cane there, and everything’s rosey.

Add a little Biss-ful Beethoven, and there ewe go.

A little bit of greed, a little bit of guilt, a lot of good done anyway. (Random ball of thick handspun dog fur to illustrate it now.)

It was years ago, but a chance conversation last night on my way out of Purlescence reminded me of it.

My audiologist’s then-receptionist saw me knitting one time, waiting for my appointment, and struck up a conversation with me.  She was a weaver, she told me, although it had been awhile since she’d done anything. But she’d been really wanting to get back into it.

And what was inspiring her, what she really wished for, was some way of getting the fleeces from her four pet alpacas spun somehow so she could weave their fur into blankets.

Okay, you know she had me all ears at that point! I did tell her there were mills that would process the fleeces into roving for handspinning, and I could bring her my Spinoff magazine and show her their ads, but all the way into yarn? That service, I wasn’t sure where to find.

However…

So, with a little trepidation on probably both our parts, we struck a deal: she would give me the fleeces, I would spin them up on my wheel, and I would give her half the resulting yarn.  Seemed fair.

Let me tell you.  Four alpacas? That is a whole lot of fluff.

The result would be a bit rustic–I didn’t have the energy nor the strength to card that kind of volume with my little hand cards, not by a long shot. Fine.

I could only guess what she was envisioning it coming out looking like, so I spun up the first skein from the black and drove down to the office to show it to her to get her reaction–because if she didn’t like it, I was going to hand the whole lot back to her and tell her she needed to find another way to get this done.  Soft and lofty, not fine, is how my wheel was going to produce it.

“Oh,” (and she exclaimed the animal’s name, which I do not remember.) “Look at this!” She held it against her face, she petted it, she stroked it, she told me about her pet that black came from, she was just absolutely thrilled.  It really could be made into yarn! This really could happen!

To me, touching those fibers had left me thinking, this is closer to llama than alpaca; clearly, her animals weren’t babies anymore. I realized, as I left, that there was no way any yarn I could make from her beloved animals was going to mean anything to me like it would mean to her.  She certainly wasn’t going to care about the micron count!

But I did.  If I spun up half for her, agreement or no agreement, the rest would sit around my house, taking up space and accusing me of my own selfishness.  I had other fibers waiting their turn at the wheel that were softer and finer, and I knew I would never get around to using hers.

It took me a month. I allocated an hour of kids-at-school time a day to it, while keeping my knitting projects going for my own sense of gratification at doing what I enjoyed doing.

Pick up a wad of fiber. Pick out the really short random bits where the shearer had hit the hair twice. Fluff it out, don’t get annoyed at wadded-up half-felted parts, spin spin spin.

Spin spin spin.

Spin spin spin.

Absolutely endless.

And I confessed to John-the-audiologist afterwards, I actually did keep one little bit of golden fleece for me, about two ounces’ worth. The very best, the very softest, I was selfish and kept it for all my work.

I felt terrible about that later.  It would have meant so much more to her than me. (I don’t think she ever knew anyway, but still. I cheated myself out of that one last bit of thrill.)

When I at last hauled a large black trashbag full of yarn to John’s office, it turned out she wasn’t there that day. I explained the whole thing to him, and he promised to get it to her.

What I didn’t know was this:

She was in the middle of a terrible, messy divorce.

Oh, poor woman! I asked John, will she be able to keep her alpacas when they get done dividing the property?

He didn’t know. He didn’t think it was working out that way from what he knew.

Oh. My. Goodness.

I never saw nor heard from her again.  She had a terribly long commute, and I guess it got to be too much and her job changed along with the rest of her upended life.  But I was assured she did get her yarn.

And I was so very glad I had given her the whole of it. Almost.  It’s a little thing, but I will always regret that one little bit held back. Those two ounces taught me a lot.

(Added later: she might well not have had any address to send a thank you to, especially at the upended time of life that must have been.   I should have passed on saying I hadn’t heard from her.  To me, the point was, I learned I should put my all into doing something for somebody because you never know what they may be going through, and it feels better by far to give of oneself whole-heartedly anyway.

Thanks to Kathleen, I found a reason to want to drop everything and go visit my sister in NYC right now.  Spinning straw into gold is one fantasy, but they actually did this?  Wow.  What does spider fabric feel like, I want to know! Gold, like glass, as an incomprehensible fluid.  Gorgeous.

I don’t imagine that kind of yarn will be on the market anytime quite too soon.

Look! Up in the sky! It’s Battman! And Bobbin, the toy winder!

(Some spontaneous wheel decorating took place about ten years ago when a kid tried to balance a cup of grape juice on the sidebars of the wheel.  This didn’t work out quite as well as was apparently hoped, and has made for endless teasing ever since.  Does the purple racing stripe bother me? Nah, get a grape on it.  No wine-ing allowed.)

Accessorizing my amaryllises.   I’ve got to show you these before they fade out.

And then, hey look, there wasn’t much overtwist after all; when I straightened out the skein, it pretty much stayed straight.

Commenter Sonya surprised me with one answer to single sock syndrome; I love it.   It came with its own single earring.  (Stitch marker, earring, hey, a necklace with dangly stitch markers would be so cool. )  Thank you!

Meantime, the rest of the Crown Mountain bag is beckoning me to come to the dark side…

Thursday at the booksigning at Purlescence, my friend Jasmin mentioned that Constance was making the drive down for the weekend.

Turns out, Jasmin had just bought a new house, and it needed a lot of work; the place had been left in terrible shape when the previous owner had passed away. Lots of her friends were coming to pitch in, scrubbing floors and walls, playing barnraising, and one of them was Constance, the same Constance I mentioned in my book; she had a three-hour drive down from the Gold Country. Any excuse to get together anyway, and this was a great one.

Saturday morning, my phone rang; did I want to be kidnapped? Heck yeah! Much though I would dearly love to, I’m not up to much when it comes to being useful, but I was greeted with huge hugs and Constance told me I was to be the decoration to the festivities, and that was that. So here, in a moment of total karma, is Constance reaching to rearrange knitting books just so while adding more on Jasmin’s bookshelf. Note the four Barbara Walker stitch treasuries to the left of her hand: the important stuff first.

But what I didn’t expect was that when I exclaimed over Jasmin’s pair of handspun socks she had sitting on a shelf in a basket, from Lisa Souza’s Jellybeanz roving, Jasmin said they were too small for her. My feet were 6.5? Here, try them on!

Thus giving new meaning for my feet to the term housewarming present, when the air conditioning kicked on briskly. Oh. My. These are wonderful. Wow.  Thank you!

When our kids, who are 19, 21, 23 in June, and 25 next week, were growing up, any trip to the Urgent Care center at our clinic or the ER came with the bonus of their daddy taking them to the local ice cream shop on the way home for comfort: what Richard calls his own “Emergency Room Medicine.”

We have in our immediate neighborhood a shop, Rick’s, which is a hole-in-the-wall place that manufactures its own ice cream right there and which is a popular local summer hanging-out place. When the old fellow who’d run it for decades retired, the guy who bought it painted cows on the walls and ivy coming from the ceiling, morphing into silk ivy coming out of the walls; it was very charming, but one day, I thought, you know? That main cow there needed a tail.

I had some yak hair. Not the soft, cashmere-y undercoat; yak hair. Wretched stuff, rips the skin off your fingers if you spin it too long at the wheel, won’t feed through the flyer without a struggle. When my oldest and I took handspinning classes together when she was 12, the teacher showed us some of this stuff, and I wrinkled my nose and went, wow. What would you ever DO with this stuff?

“Make a doormat,” Karen laughed in response. You know? That was just weird enough that I bought a pound of it against my better judgment, spun it up–although, not too much at any one sitting–and made exactly that. But there was leftover fiber (um, fancy that. It was a really small doormat. It was all I could stand.)

And then I saw that cow. And I knew exactly what I was going to do with that yak. I braided the roving (you don’t have to spin it if you leave it as roving!) and gave it to the guy so his cow could have a tail. I left a nice curl of the long fibers at the end, very cow-y.

The guy loved it, he absolutely loved it. He thought long and hard about it and never did add it to the decorations: he was afraid little kids would tear it apart. He’s right, they would have, but they would certainly have remembered the place and bugged their parents to go there all the more often, and I could always make another one. But instead he took it home as a souvenir of the good people who come into his shop, and that was that.

One summer, our Sam, our oldest, went in there, and mentioned out loud that she was thinking of applying for a job there.

The guy refused to hand her an application. He simply hired her on the spot.

But her schedule was such a problem!

He didn’t care.

But she couldn’t come in at this time, or this day, or…

He didn’t care. When could she start?

And so she scooped cones, and, a short while later, I made that tail.

She’s our daughter who had the ITP scare last week. I mentioned the Emergency Room Medicine thing to my friend and reader Kristine across the country, who happens to live a few miles from Sam but had never met her. Kristine’s reaction was, Say no more! What flavor?

Which is how my son-in-law came to open his door today to see a woman standing there holding out some Ben and Jerry’s, and he stood there, jaw on the ground, exclaiming, Do we even KNOW you?

Okay, I should stop and let Kristine tell the tale, but I have to tell you, she totally rocks. THANK you, Kristine!

(Picture: Michelle Reilly’s Lincoln lamb fleece bought at Maryland Sheep and Wool a few years ago by my parents, who watched it being sheared and bought it on the spot, plied with mohair.)

I followed my stat links to discover a comment I’d left on someone else’s blog two years ago. I offer it here with a few tweaks for clarification, since it’s out of context, and with additions to the original.

One comment for people who’d like one of my favorite shortcuts: I’ve found that if I spin separately and then ply together two different fibers–merino and mohair, or even two different breeds of sheep–and then dye the plied skeins, each of the fibers will take up the color at a different rate from the other, and you get a mild barbershop-pole effect, knitting up into a heathery look. Silk takes up dye quite a bit more slowly than animal fibers; I was given some Kidsilk Haze that needed to be a deeper, brighter color than the original dusty lilac, and when I overdyed it, the silk just sparkled in the background, being quite a bit lighter than the mohair fuzz. Much prettier than the original unicolor yarn.

I have since then bought silk/animal fiber blend yarns in light colors a number of times simply for the joy of experimenting with them.

I once snagged quite a few pounds of an undyed light brown cashmere at $15/lb from a wholesaler I knew. The catch was that it was extremely thin and single-ply and too fragile to knit up even as lace; it had to be plied on a spinning wheel. Well, guess what I have. Hey. Ply, dye, felt the hanks with some merino, perhaps, for a little extra strength–I can manage all that.

I have made three afghans with it so far. My mother knitted some into an exceedingly elegant aran sweater. And I have five pounds, half of it dyed into all these colors (we are still working on the camera thing), all waiting to be made up into the next afghan; I’m picturing a windowpane quilting pattern or some such, the undyed skeins framing the blocks of color.

But it’s been sitting in the closet, ready to go, for several years. I’ve been thinking lately that I’m going to Stitches in a couple of weeks, that the new stuff tends to push the old stash further back in the lineup, and I’d really like to see this yarn finally grow up. So. I pulled it out and looked it over.

It stopped me, just like it has every time since I dyed it. Some of the colors came out brighter than the others. Swatch swatch swatch, and yet, I don’t believe I can really know how they’ll all play together as a whole until I’ve gotten a piece done that’s way bigger than a swatch. If it were an even balance of bright and subdued, but it’s not. It’s odd; I mean, they’re all overdyed on top of this same light brown, you’d think…

So the past few days, I’ve been thinking: my hearing loss makes it so I don’t hear some things, but, I notice things that other people sometimes miss, because they’re too busy hearing the whole words while I’m focusing on the nonverbal aspects of the conversation. So. I wonder… I have a friend a few blocks away whose husband is colorblind. The walls in her family room are yellow. I wonder, if I took that stack of balls over to them, if he could tell me better than I can see how the color tones/values mesh? Since he’s missing the distraction of the reds and greens, akin to the consonants I tend to miss. I wonder if it would be clearer to me myself, if I put them in the context of the yellow walls? Or if I put it on top of her white grand piano with the white living room walls as a backdrop and looked across at them rather than down. Curious.

I have been tagged by Fiberfanatic. Six weird things about me? Other than that goofy subject line? Okay…

1. I grew up a short walk away from the house built by Frank Lloyd Wright for his youngest son: the Llewellyn house in Bethesda, Maryland. He was in the Merchant Marines, and the house was built to resemble a boat, with the roof being the deck. I used to walk past it just about every day, but like most Wright buildings, when the trees were in leaf it about completely disappeared into its setting by Cabin John Creek. Gorgeous.

2. My dad lived in France for three years just post-WWII and then settled in the DC area and made a career of helping talented French artists gain an international audience. I grew up in a house that doubled as an art gallery. (”Don’t Touch The Paintings!”)

3. I once had a pet hamster escape for months, living off the birdseed we kept by the back door downstairs for the birdfeeder and the pipe that we didn’t know was leaking inside the bathroom wall, chewing up empty (thank goodness for that) painting boxes, and finally getting caught when it ran across my brother’s face in the middle of the night when he was sound asleep (not for long).

4. I learned how to spin after knitting my husband’s hair… The rest of that story is in my book.

5. I actually got a book accepted by an actual publisher with actual stories in it I’d actually not only written but actually lived. Lifelong dreams CAN come true! “Wrapped in Comfort: Knitted Lace Shawls,” Martingale Press, July 07.

6. As the fourth of six kids born in a ten-year span, I had at least one older sibling to look up to and mimic (or not) who was going through the throes of puberty starting when I was six years old. One of the side effects of that is that it’s real hard to tell me what to do unless it’s what I want to do. For instance, this meme said I was to name the six people I’m tagging, but I say what if one of them might not want to participate, and I would hate to put someone on the spot, or, worse yet, act like the bossy big sister telling them what to do. So–as for tagging, how about instead you give a shout-out in the comments, any one and any number, and we’ll all go click on your blog if you have a blog, or you can just say it right here. Go ahead, write the post, it’ll bring back fun memories.

See? I do it my way. And being the younger sibling, I get to add, nyaa nyaa nya nyaaah nyaah on the meme rules, and run away grinning. Oh, yeah, that’s item #7, I’ll count as high as I want to, so there–I was the fastest runner except for two boys, Brooks Hansen and I forget who the other one was, in my whole grade all the way through Seven Locks Elementary school. Gee, (looking back at my siblings closing in on me), I wonder why? And yeah, I remember Brooks was one of the two because I had a crush on him in 6th grade. No wonder he ran faster than I did.

Thank you, Mary!

Blogger has been refusing to post that other picture. Let’s try this one, of the finished skein. 

I was thinking about posting about the uncertain lung x-ray that called for a repeat, putting off the repeat, finally going and getting that done a couple of days ago, and getting the report that all was cleared up now. I was thinking about posting about the half pound of cocoa powder I managed to drop across the kitchen floor this morning–but it made the kitchen smell SO good that I had to celebrate with a mug of hot cocoa (from the other tin, thank you very much). I was going to mention…

And then I remembered this bag of brown cashmere fiber I’d found yesterday while cleaning up. I’d bought it via Ebay, very cheap, because, according to the description, it was full of noils.

I haven’t spun in ages and ages. I spent from January to June where I tried a few times, but just couldn’t manage the three limbs going at once thing without finding myself breathless and so exhausted, after doing one bobbin’s worth, as to need a nap. But I liked spinning! The only way not to be frustrated with the loss was to push it far from my sight so as to concentrate on my knitting instead. Focus on what you have and be glad for it, let the rest go.

I’m doing far better now. I finished cleaning the cocoa and pulled out that bag. I made one small skein just now, plying it with a never-used-up half-bobbbin’s worth of baby alpaca/silk in a lovely gold that had been waiting its turn on another bobbin.

Noils was the least of it. No wonder I’d forgotten this stuff. You want natural fibers, hon, this is definitely au naturel: a few guard hairs mixed in, uncombed, short haired, the occasional bit of straw, noils and neps and slubs and sudden thin spots as I spun. All the charm of spinning dog fur. Tell you what, if anybody wants the rest of this–it is very soft, after all–give me a shout out at spindyeknit@nospamgmail.com (skip the no spam part) and it’s yours, first come first served, winner take all. It gave me what I needed: it got me back to my spinning fibers again, and made it clear that I can. Yay!!