Look up in that tree….It’s a bird…..No, it’s an owl….No…..It’s yarn?

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Haha, this picture is silly, but I couldn’t resist the temptation for taking a few pictures outside in our nearly balmy February conditions.

Here is a slightly less silly one:

So, this is officially my fourth finished handspun.  I’ve been knitting for almost sixteen years, and until sometime last year I’d always rolled my eyes at the thought of learning to spin.  My internal monologue went something like this: “There is already yarn.  The yarn is good.  The yarn is very, very good and there is so much to knit with it.  So very, very much to knit with it that I could never ever ever not be knitting the things and instead making the yarn. ”

And then, I drank the Kool-Aid.

After agonizing over the investment of a new wheel (a relatively simple piece of technology that somehow retails for around $600), and the amazingly high resale value of used wheels on Ebay, I found a very second-hand Louet from a local fellow who was upgrading and needed the additional studio space.  Several YouTube instructional videos later, I was on my way to spinning some uber clunky yarn and scrounging ravelry for projects requiring very little yardage.

I’m still in the shallow end of the learning curve, as you can see from the wildly uneven owl-inspired goodness above, but guess what?  I don’t care!  Its fun!  You can make yarn!  Out of like this stuff that grown on sheep!  Even if it’s jacked-up-crazy yarn, you can still make stuff out of it!  It’s squooshy and you can smoosh your face in it and smell the wooly goodness of the world, and in that moment you are sharing a kinship with an imaginary woman standing outside her croft on some wind-swept moor four hundred years ago.

The last part might just be me though.

The all important inaugural post

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Ok, so clearly a blog that I’ve been percolating on, agonizing over how to start, should start on a random Monday morning while my daughter is watching Phineas and Ferb.  I tend to over think to the point of inaction, so I’m just going to go ahead and roll on up in this thing.

Here is where I think I’m supposed to do an introduction.  Bullets are clearly in order.

  • Knitting–I knit a lot.  Let’s just say that I went to my daughter’s naturey-type preschool class the other day and realized that I was wearing the following handmade items: cowl, fingerless mits, hat, and socks.  I really do generally try to dial it back for the muggles, but sometimes the convergence of knitted items is unavoidable.   (Please also note that I was wearing a quippy knitting t-shirt and working on a pair of socks during her class.)
  • Family–I like family a lot.  I regularly entertain fantasies of living off the grid so that family can be the primary driving forces of all our lives, undistracted by pesky electricity and flush toilets.  The other unknowing participants in this fantasy are my dear “husband”, my daughter Tova (just turned 5) and our lil’ schnoodle Annie (just turned 1).
  • Food–I like food a lot.  Have you seen my pic?  That’s not from McDonalds folks.  That is straight up homemade food.  I’ll try to keep the food threads to a minimum, but sometimes a gal just has to post a biscuit pic.
  • Spinning–I like spinning a lot.  Now, if you’re confused about the aforementioned fatness combined with the spinning bullet, let me clarify that I don’t mean that bicycle going nowhere kind of spinning, I mean the kind that results in yarn.  I only started spinning in January of 2012, and I still pretty much suck at it, but I’m hooked anyway.

Ok, so enough with the wordiness, let’s get to a flipping picture already.

Brigid Sock in Progress

Here it is.  My offering to the muse.  I’m designing/knitting a sock that I will post on ravelry as a free pattern.  I will of course post my progress, but in the interest of making these posts easily digestible chunks, I’ll hold off on my motivation until another time.