A Sheep In Wools' Clothing

Bubble Bag

Hello.  My name is Dianna and I am a fiberholic.  'Nough said.

The other day, I was teaching my Queen Kahuna sock class, and my DD came with me.  She forgot her knitting bag.  Convenient of her, wouldn't you say?  She drove me batty with her boredom.  I finally sent her around the shop to find something to knit.  One thing DD is good for always in a yarn shop is yet another scarf, or yet another bag.  Especially felted bags.

This is the felted bag that DD found on this particular occasion.  Knit on 10.5 & 15 needles, carrying one strand of Donegal Tweed in gray and one strand of Odyssey in blues/brown/gray together, it is a quick knit.  Fourteen rows of garter stitch, a decrease round, an increase round, stockinette to make 12", then decreasing, a three needle bindoff, straps and felting.  We even found cool beaded embellishments to put on.....

The one above is DD's version.  She did 14 rows of SS instead of garter, for a rolled top.  Here is my unfelted version with green Donegal Tweed and Odyssey in color 404.  For both of these, the beaded embellishments were multihued, and happen to pick up on the extra colors in our yarns....

Bubble Bag addendum

DD finished her Bubble Bag on Wednesday, including felting it, after casting on Saturday afternoon.  It is knit with one strand of Donegal Tweed and one strand of Odyssey.  Hers is mainly gray, from the Donegal Tweed, with some blue both in the tweed and in the Odyssey.  My LYS gives away the pattern with purchase of the yarn, which happens to be on sale for 25% off.  She even has the wonderful little embellishments available like the one shown on DD's bag.  Mine has the greens predominating with some lavender hues coming out in the longer dangly parts.

While I had other fish to fry, like working (drat having to earn cash to pay for my fiber habits), toting two dependent children around to music lessons, groceries, laundry, etc  etc etc, I also cast on my bubble bag.  My version is a medium  sage green Donegal Tweed with a lavender and sage Odyssey.  My version is still on the needles, unfelted.  I also love this pattern, the size of the resulting bag, and the colors well enough I bought myself sufficient yarn to do a pink version as well.  Felted versions to be photographed later.

"H" is for Hero

Hero is my once-in-a-lifetime dog.  He is my first German shepherd dog, and he is imported from Holland.  He is a working dog, trained in narcotics detection and personal protection.  I got him trained, when I got to the point where I could not sleep at night for the nightmares of being stalked, assaulted and my house broken into by my ex-husband.  The dog enabled me to be able to sleep, as he would waken me for any disturbance or intrusion, and he also enabled me to be able to move about outside my home without fear of my perpetrator.

Hero is incredible.  He knows me better than I know myself.  He is amazingly intuitive with me - he knows when I am afraid.  He knows when I am not well physically.  I have no doubt that Hero would give his life to protect me.  Hero is my friend, companion and protector.

"G" is for Grandfathers

Grandfathers.  We each have two genetic grandfathers, and perhaps more non-genetic grandfathers. 

Meet my paternal grandfather.  He met my grandmother in France, where he was serving in WWI.  After the war, he returned to France, married my grandmother and brought her back to Craig, CO and the family homestead. When they had children, he made my grandmother promise to only speak English with them.  When my father had brain surgery done in his 40's and came to in ICU, he spoke French first, then English as he recovered.  It was then we realized Grandmere had spoken French with him when he was little, not English... My grandfather worked his adult life as a postal carrier in Denver.  Unfortunately, I never got to meet him, as he died when I was six weeks old.  He wrote me a letter the night I was born, which I was given many many decades later.

This is my maternal grandfather, with one of my uncles.  He was a veterinarian, and worked for the USDA inspecting herds during the Great Depression.  He would drive through Wyoming, stopping the vehicle to talk with any other driver he saw on the road.  Seeing another car on the roads in Wyoming in those days was rare.  They would talk, and exchange neckties.  Occasionally, he would receive one of his own ties back....  He also made a wire rack and placed it near the heat manifold in the car engine that held a can of soup.  When he got hungry, they would have hot soup ready.  He bartered a trick horse to pay for anesthesia or surgeon's services when his four kids had their tonsils taken out on the dining room table.  I later met the man who received the horse, and remembered it some 60 years later (and my uncle was mad, because he says the horse was his).

My children never met either of their grandfathers, who were both deceased before they were born.  Three of them now have a surrogate grandfather in a local couple.

Wedding Shawl

Disaster struck today.  A stitch got caught on the shawl, about 8-10 rows down.  A significant piece was pulled out, tightening stitches and creating a giant hole effect where there should not be anything but a patch of stockinette.

I pulled.  I teased.  I tried.  I started to tink back.  I decided I was going to be lost in where I was.  (Oh why didn't I try my first sets of lifelines????)  I frogged the whole damn thing.

Now I am casting on again.  After two weeks of dragging myself around, barely sleeping and just doing the bare necessities, I have a week off.  I am going to take "Arvey", the 13 yo Ford van style RV up to Jackman, ME to seek moose, quietude and rest.  And knit on the wedding shawl.  I have a deadline looming, and do not want to disappoint.  I'll see how far I can get tonight in starting over.  I am not certain that I will have internet service while gone, although I am taking the equipment just in case.  In the event I am without technology, I will "see" you all, my blogging family, upon my return.

I will teach my last class to the Kahuna girls tomorrow afternoon, then head out of town.  Photos to follow.

Kahuna Girls Socks

Are you ready?  The Kahuna girls met today, reportedly working on gussets on their 2 socks on 2 circs.  I think we spent more time laughing and having fun than we did knitting....

Meet the girls:

Robyne I've know since I moved to Bangor and she only thought she was outrageous until she met the rest of the class!  The rest of the girls, I just met last week, but it is as though we have known each other forever.  Marlene and Connie are MIL/DIL and get along fabulously. Ann is our quiet one - she rarely speaks, but she smiles a lot at the rest of our antics.  And Holly you will see modeling, below.

Holly acted out as our model, trying on various shop model hats and shawls/scarves as well as reading glasses for our amusement.  Marlene on the other hand, chose to model the knitted bikini, assuring all the men who were in the shop this afternoon that it would disappear on her body..... that visual met with lots of smiles (no one ran out of the shop).  My DD was struck by the fact that I am not the only outrageous woman who knits and lives in the Bangor area.  Holly even threatened to stop and roll her window down if she sees Shitty Shitty Bang Bang on the street and tell her the car is making too much noise or something.  She also informed my DD that her son is a law enforcement officer here in the area, and she'd have him watch out for SSBB and its driver....

And from the photos, you can see it degenerated from there, and we all had a grand time. 

Now we are attempting to convince Kathy, the owner of City Side  to have a sleepover at the shop - there may be some RVs parked in the parking lot....

Angora Bunnies

Remember when I attended the Maine Spinners' Registry Spin Off in Newport, ME back in February?  Well, my buddy Megan (with whom I work) was talking up bunnies and angora.  It prompted me to buy some bunny crack blend and some pure bunny to play with.

Next thing I know, I am perking up my ears when someone is talking to the woman from whom I bought my Ashford Joy about bunnies.  It turns out she used to have 25 bunnies and spun/dyed her own bunny fur and blends.  So, I listen to the care and feeding talk while at the monthly spinning meeting.  She was recommending Completely Angora to the person with whom she was speaking.

Wouldn't you know I found myself wandering through eBay seeking a copy after discovering through www.vivisimo.com that it was out of print?  And, in the course of wandering through the internet seeking more information about the angoras, I stumbled back onto Chris's blog site through the backdoor (internet) as opposed to through my bloglines list where she also appears. 

Well, several E-mails back and forth, and I am getting these two beauties from her in a couple of weeks.  They are German hybrids, good woolers, but not show quality.  They are considered black in color.  Their hutches will be next to my goose house, with the potential for putting them inside the goose house (the geese rarely use it) if the weather gets really cold.  I already have portable fencing so they can hop around in the grass when it finally makes an appearance around here.

Maybe my kids are right - perhaps I have gone overboard on this fiber thing.  But at least I haven't gotten any goat fiber with the smell story of wet goat fiber the Yarn Harlot shared this winter!  That story was enough to kill any curiosity I might have had about goat fiber....

Kahuna Girls

Kahuna Girls meet tomorrow for the second class in the series (2 socks on 2 circs) - I am optimistic I'll remember my camera and take some photos.  And add stories to the ongoing saga (last week, Holly thought Marlene was the teacher's pet, and revelled when Marlene made a mistake.  Marlene and Holly has us laughing so hard that two of us were really glad we had already had our bladder repair surgeries!  If Andrew from Stephanie 's book signing tour showed up at our sock class, he'd really wonder what sort of a world of knitters he'd stumbled on to!

Photos tomorrow!  Wedding shawl knitting tonight! (Update photo of the first completed square this weekend?)  I am working a 24 hour shift Sunday, so I am trying to cram in lots of good fiber time tonight and Saturday!

Spring Snows Are The Best...

Here it is in April, and last night we got the best snow we've had all year!  This is the scene in my backyard this morning as we got ready to leave for school/work....the lumps on the railing are the bird feeder and the planter box with a few dog tails running around the fenced area of the backyard.  One of the great things about spring snows is that they are gone quickly - most of this has already disappeared!

Raku Suri Stole Errata

Yep - I wasn't going crazy.  I make more random mistakes than to be off by the same two stitches at the same point in four consecutive pattern repeats.....

I E-mailed the Alpaca Yarn Company to ask if there were any errata for the pattern.  They weren't aware of any, but responded to my E-mail very late on Sunday evening.  I was impressed they were even checking at that hour & day of the week!  She forwarded my question to the designer, who wrote back this morning.  Indeed, the symmetry around the corner stitch in the squares was missing in five rows of the pattern.

Here are the corrections for any of you with the pattern, Chart B for the leaf square design:
The pattern should be symmetrical about the corner stitch.
Row 49 Should have a center double decrease at square 20
Row 51 Should have a right dec at sq 23
Row 59 should have a right decrease at sq 53 (the 5th square before the petal )
Row 63 Should have a center double decrease at square 20
Row 65 should have a rt decrease at sq 53

Enjoy!  This is a fun knit thus far!