Midnight Knitter

Crazy Knitting

Yep, I am totally knitting on the wild side; I hit the stash last week and pulled out some Crazy Zauberball in the wildest, hottest colors I had. Sometimes you just need to have some zing in the knitting, you know.

It seems like forever since I made something for myself. I made mitts to give to scleroderma patients, I’m still working on the PuppyPaca yarn for my friend Deb, and I have several more alpaca projects to finish for Alta Vida Alpacas. Last week I kind of snapped, found the Crazy Zauberball, and decided to make some fun things for myself. Check out these little bed socks: fun!

Socks — This yarn is Crazy Zauberall, and it is so rewarding to knit with. It is pretty light weight and knit a little loosely in this pattern; perfect for bed socks. Then there is the lace… These Om Shanti socks are from the Socktopus book by Alice Yu.

The heels and toes are knit with a short row technique that really made the toes strut their stuff. Ravelry notes are here.

I have enough yarn left over to make a pair of mitts to wear in bed too. The colors of this yarn just make me happy. I will have to make the mitts for sure.

Mostly the gardening has been on hold this week. It has really warmed up over the last few days and suddenly roses started blooming. Here are the first ones to open…

The Hot Cocoa roses by the front door are doing great. I covered them several times this spring with blankets supported by tomato cages between the rose plants. All the attention has paid off big time! As I was leaving for a doctor’s appointment I glanced at the front of the house and there was the bloom!

Home Run Rose — My Home Run roses by the driveway are now almost 3 feet high and suddenly they also began blooming. These guys will bloom all summer!

The backyard gardens are still jungles, but it rained hard last night so I’m hoping to weed out another flower bed tomorrow morning. How lucky that plants are patient.

Cat asleep on shawl — Kitty revenge can be quite a thing: MacKenzie still hasn’t gotten over the washing of his blanket. He spends very little time on it now, and has taken to sleeping on my “Waiting for Rain” shawl. He’s so sweet I’m letting him keep it for now.

One Crazy Zauberball project just isn’t enough right now. As soon as the bed socks were done I grabbed another ball and cast on another project just for myself.

Yarn — May I present the yarn for a Solaris shawl by Melanie Berg. The shawl is supposed to use 5 different MadelineTosh Unicorn Tails (in five different colors), but I decided to use this wild Crazy Zauberball yarn for the colored sections. There are at least 5 different colors in there; I can always pull off yarn to get to another color if I need to as the colored sections are pretty short.

So why did I snap and start the crazy knitting for fun? The truth is, I’m somewhat miserable these days. For reasons I don’t understand June is the month when my illness decides to get particularity ugly on me. For the third year in a row I just feel pretty darn sick. My muscles and joints hurt, I’m dizzy, my gut is misbehaving, I’m running a fever, my arms and legs have developed edema… I got out of breath and had to use my inhaler while winding a ball of yarn last Wednesday at my knitting group. I’ve been in to visit doctors twice already this month, and really, there isn’t too much that they can do. I’m in a flare for sure. Mostly I don’t leave the house much, but I can still knit.

You see why I broke out the Crazy Zauberball? Bright happy colors that change quickly. How can I not smile while knitting lime green and deep rose? This month I totally need some knitted hugs of happiness, and Zauberball delivers big time.

Got to go. I’m at the part of the shawl where I start knitting in some crazy color. Bright purple! Woohoo!

Have a great weekend everyone!!

MacKenzie Speaks: The First Week of June

Hi. I’m MacKenzie. The Mother of Cats has spent the day reading a book, so I’ve taken over here to share the week with you.

Living Room — She has been cleaning this week. Crazy. She kept muttering about cat hair, vacuuming, the importance of guarding against wool moths… Impossible to understand! Yellow Boy is very upset because the furniture got moved around…

MacKenzie Waiting for Blanket — and she even washed my cat blanket. Sigh. It took forever for it to dry. I know. I counted.

Flowers — She hung out new flowers on the deck…

Quilt and socks — and sewed a quilt top with roses on it. It’s OK, I guess; the green highlights my eyes. Instead of quilting it, though, she stopped and made matching bed socks. I don’t know why she stopped quilting. I only messed with the machine a FEW times…

Cat stink eye — She said I was exhausting her. Hey. She washed my blanket. I need to lay on something!!

Cat at door — All the neighborhood children are out of school now and playing out front. She, however, won’t let me go out to play with them.

Cat asking nicely to go out. — I even asked nicely!!

MacKenzie in Cat Mint — Thank heavens I get to play in the backyard. The catmint is coming right along…

Cat in catmint — Sigh. I told Yellow Boy to stop doing that!!

Cat in grass — Well, that’s the week. Its nice and hot outside now, and the Mother of Cats is in the lawn chair reading her book and eating leftover Chinese take out. I’m in camouflage waiting for a moth. Or maybe a garter snake. If that darn squirrel comes down I’ll give him a chase that he won’t quickly forget…

June is for cats!

Notes from the Mother of Cats:

The socks are Om Shanti bedsocks by Alice yu.
The yarn is Crazy Zauberball in the colorway 2170_Blasser Schimmer
The quilt is a kit I found years ago at the Great Amrican Quilt Factory called “Leading Ladies”. Fast, simple, fun. Even with cats who help a little too much.
The book is The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin. All knitting activities are basically on hold while I finish this book.

Biology Brain

When I taught high school biology I had a sign over the door of my classroom that said “Biology is Life”. (I also had a poster with a picture of Charles Darwin and a caption that said “AP Biology: Adapt, Migrate or Die”, but that is another story…) Anyway, I thought my sign over the door was cute. And true.

This week I finally took on the task of weeding out my flower beds and getting them ready for the new year. Really, a simple and somewhat rewarding task, but for me an afternoon of rich classroom memories and an endless rush of biological trivia. It was so much fun, in fact, I thought I’d take all of you on a short trip through my garden. Ready? Here we go!

Unweeded Garden — What a disaster! This garden has several little tea roses, a beautiful English rose, and some nice perennials. Ugh. Mostly I see dandelions…

Flower and Bee — Clever camera: it focused on the grass instead of the flower. (and my biology brain reminds me that the grass is a monocot and the dandelion is a dicot. Thanks bio buddy…) Oh, well. You can still make out the bee in the flower, can’t you? We think of dandelions as pests in our gardens (well, I do!), but they are actually early blooming plants and an important source of food for bees and

Ladybug — my personal favorite (after bumblebees) the ladybug. Later on the youngsters from this beetle will help keep my aphid population on the roses under control, so that makes dandelions a good thing,

Dandelion Puff — I know that they are good for the wildlife, but I still have to get rid of these darn plants so my roses can shine. Look at this puffball of seeds (dandelions use wind as a dispersal strategy chants my brain… The seeds can survive up to 5 years and help the plant population survive fires…)

Dandelion root — and the root! I’ve been told that the root as also an adaptation to help the plant survive prairie fires. Don’t know about that one, but we all know we need to get the root out or the plant will come back. (That root is a tap root . Thanks biology brain…)

Pill Bug — Oh, wow. A pill bug! I love these guys. I would teach my AP Biology class how to make potato traps and assigned them the homework of catching 10 bugs over a weekend so they could design experiments using them in little choice chambers. The students learned how to design controlled experiments, drew conclusions about animal behavior, and the bugs had a fun outing and all the potato they could eat. It was fun, really. (Arthropods, crustaceans really, says the ever intrusive biology brain.) Over the years so many bugs were released in the flower beds at the front of the high school a robust population could be counted on to bail out any student team that forgot to do their homework.

Earthworms — Exactly the same type of thing happened at my house where yearly infusions of classroom earthworms established many happy garden occupants. (Annelids, says the brain. If you accidentally cut them with the shovel they will probably make it, but not as two new worms. ) My students loved to name and race their worms. If you put them in your hand you can feel the little bristles on their tummies (Setae! Thanks, brain.) The bristles anchor the worm as it pushes forward in the soil. Kind of like wax on cross country skies…

Rose Seeds — The English rose has a mature rose-hip with seeds in it. Look at these guys. I wonder if I can get them to sprout and grow. (…the seed is really a baby plant and the food it needs to grow. The food part of the seed is double fertilized so it has more copies of the roses’s chromosomes than the rose plant does. Roses, unlike humans, can have different chromosome numbers… shut up biology brain. Enough!!)

Finished Rose Garden — The weeding is done. You can actually see the rose plants OK now. They all came through the winter in good shape and are putting out new growth. The largest rose is my Princess Alexandra of Kent rose, and it has started growing the first buds. All is looking good. Time to mulch, feed (plants need the elements in fertilizer to make more proteins and to copy the DNA in their cells so they can divide… yep, the brain is still going…) and get to work on the other ~~jungles~~ gardens.

Rich with life, details and memories, my gardens are once again growing.

Biology is life!!

Alpaca Days

My friends at Alta Vida Alpacas have gotten the first mill run of yarn made from their animals back. Woohoo!! It is Christmas in May! Cari Corley (of AVA) gave me samples to be knit up to help establish some critical characteristics of the yarn: mostly she is concerned with how the knitted fabric will wear, its gauge and the hand of the knitted fabric. They have two types of alpaca on the ranch, Suri and Huacaya, and the sample packages that she passed over the Starbuck’s table to me contained undyed yarn made from both alpaca types. Knit some stuff with this, she said. Like I said, Christmas in May. I quickly stuffed the bags into my knitting tote before she could take them back.

Huacaya alpaca — Look at this guy! The fiber he (she?) produces is to dye for. That’s right, this fiber will take dye like a charm. The yarn is white right now, but it won’t stay that way for long now that the yarn has arrived.

She gave me some unbelievable Huacaya yarn in a light bulky weight. We decided to knit it into a hat, and the pattern that her husband Dan chose is the Man Hat by Haven Ashley. I knitted it up in a jiffy (OK, it took an evening…) and this is what I got.

As soon as I finished the hat I shot off a selfie of the finished product to Cari. Poor light, yummy hat.

The light isn’t great on this shot because it was late at night (Hello…Midnight Knitter here!) but you can see the details of the hat. I added four rows of K1, P1 ribbing at the bottom as I wasn’t too sure about the elasticity of the yarn. As it turns out, it was not a problem at all. The yarn maintains shape really well and shows the stitch definition through a slight halo. On my head it feels like a cloud of soft warmth. Forget Man Hat; I want this hat. How about dyed a nice red? Should I add a pom pom? A crocheted flower?

There was enough yarn left over from the hat make a mitt (one, only one…) using the same stitch pattern and gauge. Here is the finished set:

Hat and MItt — I need to talk Cari out of enough yarn to make the second mitt… The mitt that I have is like heaven on my hand. 🙂 Ravelry notes are here for the hat and the mitt.

Once I had made the hat (actually, I made a second hat of another run of the bulky yarn that was processed a little differently so that the two yarns could be compared to each other) and the mitt it was time to take on the other yarn that was given to me, a sport weight silky and shiny yarn made from Suri alpaca.

Scarf — The yarn is turning into a 7 inch wide scarf that is a joy to knit; once again I’m coming up short on yarn and will have to talk to Cari to get some more so that it can be finished. How long should this scarf be? I’m thinking 60″, but I would love some input.

I steamed the lace to block it a little for the pictures and an amazing thing happened: the yarn bloomed, lost some shine, bulked out a little as it fluffed, and moved way up the softness chart.

Maybe Cari won’t make me give this stuff back.

What color should I dye my new set of alpaca accessories?

And Thus Summer Arrives.

Happy Memorial Day everyone!

Putting On The Dog

This is Jake.

Dog — Isn’t this the sweetest face you ever saw?

Jake was the much loved pet of my knitting friend Deb, and he passed over the rainbow bridge some time back, but due to the foresight of Deb a fairly large bag of his leavings remain. Deb saved the handfuls of fur that she brushed out when he was shedding, and a few weeks ago she passed the bag of doggie down to me to see if I could spin it.

Here’s the problem with dog fur. There are actually two types of hair in that coat: the guard hairs are the beautiful shiny coat that we see, and underneath there is a layer of fluffy undercoat; short, not so shiny, and very warm. While the soft and glossy guard hairs seem like they would spin up into yarn, they are actually too slick and stiff to behave themselves in yarn. They spring right out of the plies and poke like crazy. Bad dog!!

The saved fur that Deb gave me contained a lot of the undercoat layer, but the strands were really kind of short. I decided that the best thing to do would be to pull out as much of the locks of guard hair as I could (sorry Jake!) and then blend the remaining hair/down mixture with another longer fiber like wool or alpaca. Deb liked the look of Jake mixed with alpaca, so that’s what we did.

Alpaca — I had a buff colored alpaca fleece in my stash, so I opened up the locks and ran it through my drum carder to make batts. I split each batt, weighed the amount of fiber and put it into a labeled storage container.

Dog fur — I then cleaned up and made matching containers of dog down (with some guard hairs) that would allow me to create 50/50 blended batts on my drum carder with the alpaca and the dog. Good plan, right?

Loading dog down onto drum carder — To do the blending I took a matched set of alpaca and dog containers to the drug carder to make a new 50/50 batt. The alpaca loaded right onto the drum of the carder with few problems. Jake, however, was too short to feed in so I manually loaded him onto the large drum just like I would if I was working with a blending board. I alternated the alpaca and dog to create layers of each in the batt.

Cat meets dog — MacKenzie was pretty interested in the dog down!

Finished batt — Here’s the final carded product of alpaca/dog blend. The sprig on the batt is cat mint because, well, doesn’t it seem appropriate?

The carding has been going slowly because it has been raining off and on for several days, and if it isn’t warm enough my hands get all cranky. I wanted to work outside as there was waste dropping out of the fibers as I worked; best to keep all that out of the house! I finally got several batts finished late last week and the spinning began.

Drafting — Because the alpaca has longer fiber than the dog down it is really helping me with the spinning. There’s dog down in that drafting triangle but it’s behaving itself very nicely. I am spinning the singles pretty fine (for me); the finished two ply yarn will be between fingering and sport weight.

Singles — Here’s the first yarn on the bobbin. You can just seen the cinnamon colored dog escaping the twisted ply. This yarn will have a halo for sure, but I’m hoping that it won’t shed too badly.

I took the bobbin of yarn to knitting this week to show to Deb, and we pulled off enough to make her a sample of two ply yarn that is about 10 meters long so she can see how it knits. She’s looking at shawl patterns while I continue to spin Jake’s fur into yarn. It’s kind of exciting. We are debating what to call the yarn.

Alpaca-Arf? DoggiePac?

I think that Deb is settling into calling it PuppyPaca.

Beautiful Jake. Forever in Deb’s heart, and soon to be a fabulous shawl.

Snowfling Mitts are done!!

…and for the first time in quite a while it isn’t going to snow this weekend. Figures, but who am I to complain. Check these babies out!

Lining of mitts — and they are lined!! I used superwash merino sock yarn for the lining.

These mitts are the Snowfling Mitts by Tanis Lavallee. The MJ Yarns American Worsted (the purple painted yarn) was just a little bit smaller in diameter then the Malabrigo Rios (black), so I carried the black yarn in my right hand and the purple in my left while I was knitting the pattern. Since the stitches knit with the left hand are a little larger it all worked out to make a balanced fabric. The American Worsted yarn had a little more twist to it and seemed to be denser, which helped make these mitts really nice and cushy inside where the stands are located. So happy with how it came out. There is just enough room for me to slip a hand warmer into the mitt if I need it.

Here are my project details and notes on Ravelry.

In the middle of the week I mowed my lawn for the very first time this year and took out the lawn furniture. This is a major event; spring has arrived!!

Back yard — Doesn’t this look promising? You wouldn’t know it to look at it but two days before this there was snow all over the grass… Tomorrow I may go to the nursery to buy some hanging plants for the deck. I’m hopeful that we are done with the snow, but it could still happen. I’m keeping those mittens out for a few weeks before I pack them away to wait the the fall’s first snow.

Drum Carder — Since it was so nice outside I set my drum carder up on the patio table and began working on an alpaca fleece that I’ve been wanting to spin. This fleece is just wonderful. It is sooo soft and the locks opened like a dream. It was a joy to feed it into the carder.

Cat asleep in alpaca fleece — MacKenzie likes it too!

I’m so happy carding this alpaca I was motivated today to go digging in the fleece stash and found two different wool fleeces that are just amazing grey colors. Wow, my spinning wheel is going to be really, really happy. There is some serious spinning coming his way. I hope that the nice weather holds so I can do most of this carding outside.

Have a great weekend everyone. Happy Mother’s Day!

Rocking the Week #7

It was a really busy and productive week. I already wrote two posts about parts of it (finishing the dishtowels and the cause of bad, bad kitties), but here is the rest of the highlights of the week.

Mitts and Markers — Sorry for the quality of the picture. It’s cloudy outside but you can still get an idea of the glorious color of these mitts. While I was weaving this week I wished I had light weight mitts that hugged my wrists and stayed put above my knuckles while I was working. Here they are! My project notes on Ravelry are here if you want to make a pair too. 🙂 I also made stitch markers from some of the glass beads that I bought at the Interweave Yarn Fest a couple of weeks ago.

Cat and Mitt — I also got the first of the Snowfling Mitts finished (well, except for the top of the thumb…) this week. These mitts also are lined so there is a lot to still knit, but I am happy with what I have so far. I love that Purple Dragon colorway!! Here are the project notes.

More Yarn — Then my friends convinced me that I had to make an Exploration Station with these colors…

Plastic case — and then I found this little plastic case to carry knitting essentials. It has all of these little compartments to carry stitch markers, cable needles, sewing needles, etc.

Folded Case — and it all folds up into one tidy little package. Just amazing!! Just what I need. It was hard to buy only one of these…

Grandson as an Ant — Yesterday was Earth Day, and I went to my grandson’s performance of Goin’ Buggy at his school. Isn’t he the cutest thing as a Red Ant?

Flowers and Chipotle — On the way home I stopped by the nursery and got these flowers to put out front (it was Earth Day!!) and bought a burrito bowl at Chipotle. While I was eating I noticed the picture on the bag. Say, what? Soldiers, helicopters, buckets of fish?? How unusual…

Chipotle Bag — Then I turned the bag. There is a story here for sure, I told myself. Yep. On the other side of the bag I found this story about a young child eating his last dinner before leaving a refuge camp for America. It just brought tears to my eyes. You can read the essay by Fue Xiong called Two Minutes About Sardines here.

What an end to the week. This refuge/immigrant story just meant so much to me. Over the years I have taught many refuges to this county, but during one of my last years in the classroom I taught all of the “sheltered” biology classes at my high school. “Sheltered” classes are for students who are acquiring English as a second language, and the students are all mixed together. They were from Somalia, Congo, Mali, China, Myanmar, Peru, Syria, Mexico, Viet Nam, you name it. They were all a little shell shocked, earnest, hard-working, respectful and determined to survive. They were caring and supportive. They learned English and biology from me, and I learned so much more from them. I still have some of their labs and writings. They all made me a better person and appreciative of how many things I have that would be easy to take for granted. Earth Day, indeed.

What a nice end to the week. A special morning with my grandson, a great lunch and some food for my soul at the same time.

Have a great weekend everyone!!

A Break in Routine: Oxygen, Snow and Bad Cats

So much snow! Last Friday night the rain started just as I was heading to bed, and in the morning there was already several inches of snow on the ground. It just poured snow for the next 24 hours, and even though there was a lot of melting (thankfully on the sidewalks and streets), it really piled up on the lawns and in the trees. When it was over I had over a foot of heavy compacted snow on the deck and lawn.

Snow on flowers — Sadly the snow hit just as many of the ornamental trees were in full bloom. This tree, which might have been a crab apple, really got socked in snow.

Trees all over town lost branches as the weight of the snow became too much for them. Ever an opportunist, I brought some of the blooms from broken branches into the house.

The blooms were a happy addition to a basically unhappy house. Last Friday just as the storm was getting ready to break I got a call from the pulmonologist’s office; my test results were back and she was ordering supplemental oxygen for me to use overnight. It was kind of a shock as I’d convinced myself that my lungs weren’t that bad. Less than two hours later the machine had arrived and was set up for me to use.

Oxygen machine — Here’s the oxygen condenser that I need to use while I’m sleeping. It buzzes, vibrates, and makes other noises that scare Yellow Boy. Cat harmony is definitely not being maintained. I’m getting used to it pretty quickly; it is kind of like sleeping in an airplane. 🙂 Now that I am getting more oxygen during the night I’ve noticed that my morning chest pain is gone. That’s is a good thing! Sorry Yellow Boy, the machine stays.

You never saw such unhappy cats. Between the snow and the machine they were just miserable.

Cats at back door. — Here they are anxiously waiting at the back door to be let out first thing in the morning. MacKenzie is just awful about this. He starts meowing (yowling!!) and scratching at the wood at 6am. He doesn’t come upstairs to wake me up because, well, machine…

Cat at computer — Cats do sulky outrage. MacKenzie especially has been a pill all week. He was all over stuff when I tried to work at the computer. He demanded endless treats. He followed me from room to room and participated in all crafting ventures. If I stopped paying attention to him the paw (with attached claws) came out.

Cat — He took to lurking in the “launch tube” part of his cat tree at the back door. Every time I opened the door he streaked out before I could stop him. We had some scary moments when he got past me into the garage and the electric door was closing. Truly, he was a handful all week.

Mac and Me — Tonight it has been a week since the scary machine and the snow arrived, and things are almost back to normal in the cat world. Here he is purring on my lap and posing for a selfie. What a sweet boy. Ha!

This weekend is going to be nice and the last of the snow should melt. The cats are slowly adjusting to the new machine and this morning we slept in a little. All is once again right in the cat world.

Next week’s forecast: thunderstorms!

I haven’t told the cats yet.

Finished Objects: Dishtowels!!!

This has been going on for weeks. I warped the loom almost a month ago and since then I’ve been working on a set of dishtowels off and on. I’ve been posting pictures of the weaving on the loom, but they all kind of look the same and I hated to keep boring all of you with the pics. The work has been disrupted by snow, doctor’s appointments and knitting ~~emergencies~~ deadlines, but this week I finally got to the end of the warp; the weaving was done.

Yesterday I pulled out my best sewing shears, gritted my teeth and cut the warp. I mean, I’ve been so careful to not injure any of the warp threads for days and days, and now I have to cut them?! Yikes! But as soon as I’d pulled the cloth out it was totally worth it,. Look, look!!

Cloth — Here’s the cloth handing over my stair rail showing two different sections of the 5 yard length of weaving. The cloth on the left required me to change color bobbins every twenty threads and the right section of cloth was made using natural colored cotton weft. If you are a weaver and interested, these towels are turned twill, 20 tpi, made on my 8 shaft Schacht Baby Wolf loom. I used 8/2 unmercerized cotton thread.

Cutting towels apart — There were five towels in the length of cloth; each towel is about 30″ long. Today I cut them apart (I wove in a tiny white strip to give me a cutting line…)

Ironing Towels — Pressed a folded hem on each side of the towels…

Finished towels. — and my towels are done. I have three of the white weft check towels and two of the plaid check towels. My kitchen is going to be very, very happy with these. I’m now trying to think of how to make curtains in these colors for the kitchen window.

I folded up the loom this afternoon and rolled it back into the office to its usual hibernating location. As I wedged it back into the closet I do believe that the spinning wheel shivered his treadles at me. He’s right. It is about time that he got to come out to play.

Next week it will be spinning time! Woohoo!!