I’m still playing around with practice batts. This time, I used my gray wool, black alpaca, and pink silk noil that Heidi from the Artful Ewe gave me a couple years ago.

The swatch is my 2 ply, and the ball is 3 ply. I’m interested in the difference between the two once they’re knit. This batt is significantly softer than the ugly orange/brown one I was working on last time. I think it’s due in part to the wool, but mostly the alpaca. My black is considerably finer than my brown.

I’m really just biding my time ’til my wholesale order arrives. It’s been shipped!!! I should get it in a week, and it’s full of different colors of superfine alpaca, silk tops and noils, some different wools to play around with (just to see how they compare in a batt with my Romney), mohair locks (to see how they compare with what I can get locally), and I snuck in some baby camel down for me :-).

I have high hopes that the superfine alpaca will make my batts deliciously soft. I’m pretty pleased with how this black and pink one is coming. Visually, it’s still not what I’m going for, but with each try, I’m refining it and working it until ultimately I have my own, perfected (according to me anyway, I know it’s subjective) recipe.

I have a monster headache today. I could even feel it and was aware of the pain in my sleep last night so I’m exhausted.

My elbows are getting better. I had a physical therapy appointment this morning, and the tightness and pain are moving and pinpointing. I’m hoping that I’ll be substantially better in another month.

So, aside from Hayden moving to New York this week, our babysitter moved to North Carolina (this week),

and another fiber-appreciating friend is moving to Turkey next month. I threw her a farewell BBQ yesterday.

This so royally sucks.

Nate keeps asking me if I’m ok, and I’ve caught him looking at me like I’m going to break at any second. I guess I’m not handling myself as well as I think I am.

So, I’m ignoring my house and laundry and playing with fiber. I guess that the official term for what I’m doing is R&D, or Research and Development. I was talking with Nate and a bunch of men at a social gathering last night who were surprisingly interested in my little business and asked a ton of questions (that was flattering. They also made fun of me, but that’s how it goes with these guys, and I throw plenty their way as well). And that’s what they called it. Research and Development.

I’m good with that.

SO, I’m doing Research and Development, which sounds so much nicer than “ignoring my house and laundry to play with fiber”, but they’re essentially the same thing.

I took some of my dyeing disasters (the silk was the biggest disaster) and made some batts. Then stripped them in half lengthwise to experiment.

I spun up little half/batt skeins

balled them up and have begun knitting a swatch to see which fibers and configurations I like, trying desperately to ignore the fact that the colors are heinous.

And knitting a swatch with what looks like Hunter Orange flecks of silk in it is what drew the attention of the men. My participation in the conversation ended when I was asked if I could dye and spin belly button lint. I said, “probably”, they started chortling and lifting their shirts, and I left to find some women to talk to.

So, aside from working with the batts, I dyed more yesterday. This first picture is Tussah noil, Bombyx noil, and a clump of the romney locks I’ve been working with, all dyed in the same pot at the same time. I added salt this time to see if that would help the wool dye evenly.

Nope. But the silk did fine.

So I mixed up my little jars of Jacquard dyes, blended a couple colors together to re-create the blended nature of the Judith dyes that are giving me trouble.

Though the orange wool looks the same in both photos, they’re completely different. The wool in the top photo is distinctly red and yellow, and the bottom photo is a lovely, dark rust color. The rust dyed pretty even, just a little darker at the tips, which is fine. The blue/wine locks are divided like my Judith dyed wool.

SO, I emailed my wool supplier, and when they are back in town in August, I’m going to get me some new fleece. It has to be the fleece. I probably bought the one freaky fleece out of 5,000 that is dye resistant. They want me to bring some of my wool down with me so they can check it out. They’re stumped, too.

And my sister-in-law just called to confirm that I’m hosting our get together this morning.

Oops. Forgot about that.

So I have 45 minutes or so to shower, get dressed, and try to clean up a bit for company.

Oh, and one more thing. We changed the font on my Tweedy Batts website/logo. Do you like it?

I am grateful to those who sacrifice to protect and uphold this country, and to those in the beginning, who had tremendous vision and were willing to sacrifice everything to build it.

This year, Independence Day has me thinking about my own little life, and about how much I enjoy the freedom I experience day to day. To choose what I do. To do what I love (which is why my house is usually a mess. That and the fact that I live with an artist husband and 4 young kids who have me for a mom to learn habits from).

It seems like our own, personal freedom is highly controlled by the choices we make. The risks we’re willing to take. The things we’re willing to try, even if they’re scary. Or the sometimes unpleasant or monotonous work we put in to eventually achieving something that’s important to us.

Reflecting like this actually makes me want to be more responsible. More productive. To step back and think about what I really want and what I need to do to get there. At this exact moment, I’m wanting to finish organizing my house. Finding places for all the things that pile up and cloud my brain. A place for everything means that the house will be capable of being tidy, and the time I spend fretting over clutter, and moving things from here to there will be free.

Freedom.

This may sound silly. Petty even. But I’m responsible for my own little family, my own little home, my own little piece of this great country, my friends and associates and the people I interact with and with whom I have influence. I’m free to make as much or as little of it as I will. Right now, that sentiment is filling me with joy and gratitude. And I’m happy.

I’m kicking butt this week. I’ll save it for tomorrow, but I’ve had a fantastic week that I’m quite pleased with, health-wise, and I’m really hoping I can make it through the holiday without blowing it.

I weighed myself this morning, just in case, and I’ve dropped 6 pounds since Saturday. I’m sure much of it is water, and that’s fine. I feel good. I’m flushing stuff out. I have more energy. I have a killer headache today. I don’t know what that’s about.

Anyway, I’m going to take my spinning wheel to the festivities tonight. If my hands are busy, hopefully, I’ll stay away from the food. I went spinning last night with a sweet group of people, and nearly finished my bobbin of wolf spun mohair. I topped it off this morning and plied it.

I know it looks like a big mess in the pictures, but really, for the most part it’s very subdued blues and purples, with a splash of something brilliant here and there. It’s magnificent. I’m so excited.

Excited enough that I’m not going to be snacking all night long. I have 1000 calories left for the day, that can surely accommodate a small dessert or two.

My floor is sticky. It’s always sticky. Which is why I don’t mop very much, because whether or not I mop, it’s sticky. Oh, I do know how to mop. And after I mop, it’ll be beautifully, lick-ably clean until someone that isn’t me walks into the room, at which point….

instantly sticky.

So I don’t mop. (One of my friends literally mops 5 times a day. I’d go insane). However, half of my dining chairs don’t slide anymore. They’re gripping the floor. It’s very inconvenient when I’m bustling about, cleaning up or setting out dinner and a chair is in the way (because they’re always in the way. They’re never pushed in and tidy unless I do it, at which point someone other than me comes into the room and then they’re all over the place again), and I go to move it out of the way as I pass, half thinking about it, and it doesn’t move and I crash into it.

This has been going on for some weeks now. I’m done.

So, we’re going to the store today to buy new pads (the things that stick to the bottom of the chairs to avoid scratching our floor. They don’t work as far as avoiding scratches go, but they do effectively reduce the scratching). Then the girls and I will mop the floor, change out the pads, and have sliding chairs again.

Hopefully for a number of months.

Please.

Many months.

Hayden came over last night for the last time.

Two of the three of my girls cried for close to an hour after she left. One quite forcibly. The only reason I didn’t is that I’m clinging to the fact that we’re going to dinner in two weeks. I’m just stalling.

It’s so hard. Aaaand, here I go again, so we’re moving on.

I’m officially an LLC! Tweedy Batts, LLC to be specific. Mwahahaha. I WILL figure out how to dye, and I WILL get set up with a fiber distributor to get my exotic fibers to blend, and I WILL make lovely batts.

It’s just taking forever.

In the meantime, I’ve begun a project I’m excited about. You won’t be able to tell how incredibly delicious it is in pictures, but it’s all I have to offer.

It’s the mohair I bought at Black Sheep. I wolf spun some and plied it with a smooth alpaca/merino single, washed it, and knit a swatch.

It’s gorgeous and unbelievably soft. I’m going to make a sweater for myself out of it. I know I keep saying that, but I really am. This time, for sure.

Liv is playing Lisa Loeb on her guitar right now. I’ve been working with her, and she’s doing really well. She said she’s trying to get “crispy fingers” like me.

And so goes another day of summer.

I told them they could make granola today. I think that should come before we mop the floor.

We’re back from a fantastic and busy weekend away.

We went to the Black Sheep Gathering for a few hours on Friday.

Everyone loved the sheep, but most especially it seemed, my 26 year old brother.

I bought my first spindle (It would be my ONLY spindle, if I didn’t hope to acquire a Moosie at some point)

It’s a Spindlewood mini, and it’s very cool. So’s the sweet Spindlewood lady, Connie

I also bought a pound of beautifully dyed and picked mohair locks

I ended up with most of the bag. (Second shelf from the bottom, middle).

Then we were off to Bend to visit my mom, where we packed more into three days than I would have thought possible.

Today, I have another dyepot going. It isn’t doing what I thought it would. Again. BUT, I’m not done with it yet. I started off by doubling the dye I used last week, but I think I had too much vinegar in there and it struck too fast and unevenly. So, I’m adding another half cup of dye, doubling it again.

We’ll see.

I’m ready to move on to another color though. It’s all been the same reddish pink so far.

I’m finally making my dye stocks.

It’s taking awhile, because I only have one pot to do it in,

and it isn’t great. (There’s space under the rim that dye gets into when I pour it into its container, and then it leaks back out, slowly, over several minutes). So I’m going to buy a new pot after this batch is done.

I’m so excited. One more step closer to actually dyeing. It’s been, what, a year now? Maybe more?

On Friday night, we took the kids up to the drive-in to watch Kung Fu Panda.

It was really cold, and really fun.

Not that I’m surprised, but there’s a reason she’s “Mother MacKenzie”. She’s brilliant, of course.

I had a wonderful time. Mostly, it was fine tuning what I knew, but there were a few earth moving lessons learned.

Firstly, how to change yarn diameter without changing anything but tension.

I never use tension. I always spin with as little tension as I can possibly get on my wheel. I had no idea it was a tool.

I learned how to blend mohair locks with silk and spin it laceweight incredibly easily.

I spun a yarn that I think would make great socks, for the first time ever, (the pink one), along with yak, yak and silk, yak and merino, bison, cashmere and silk…

revisited cabled yarns (the blue/green above), and then there was Judith’s “wolf” yarn.

Fascinating. Plus, her drum carder can card wool without being teased, and is reportedly (I haven’t heard an official price yet) less expensive than the Pat Green Supercard I’ve had my eye on.

I’m happy my first class with Judith was in such a small, intimate grouping of friends. I love my little spinning group.

SO, back to the real world. I haven’t cleaned up from Veronica’s Saturday birthday party yet.

Well, we’ve cleaned the table and done the dishes, but the art project is still set up in the living room and is an absolute mess.

I have lots to do. And tomorrow is an all day field trip/BBQ for the 3rd through 6th graders on a beach an hour or so north, and right now it’s a toasty 47 degrees and as dark and wet as you could imagine. And has been all week.

I think I’m going to look into bringing supplies for BBQ hot chocolate. I only have two dutch ovens, though, and there will be 50 kids (between A and O’s classes) plus their accompanying adults and young siblings. How is this going to work?

(and rambling on, apparently). This turned out to be a long post!

Well, I’m not dead yet. I keep thinking I’m better, then I keep being not better. I’m mostly tired during the day, then an hour or so before bed, I can’t breathe and I cough my guts out.

But I’m still managing to socialize some. Yesterday, I met a few spinners at a local bookstore and we spun in the common area. I hadn’t spun since January. It was nice. I pulled out a hand dyed roving of superwash merino and alpaca. I can’t spin those fine fibers short draw with any consistency. I get thick and thin clumps. So I pulled off a length, wrapped it over the top of my finger and spun long draw, double draft off the fold. It took awhile to get back in the groove, having been all about guitar for so long, but I soon started to relax into it and enjoy the colors.

So here’s a catch up on photos over the last week or so since I started feeling crummy.

Mmm, we’ll back up a little further.

On Saturday night, a week and a half ago, Nate took his Christmas present from me out for it’s first ride with some friends and their cars.

(See the truck flying through the air on the right?)

It didn’t take long for Nate’s car to start making a weird noise, at which point everything stopped and the car was torn apart into little pieces.

I’m not exactly sure why I was so eager to enter Nate into a hobby so perilous. When you talk to anyone that runs RC cars, their car/cars are always broken. Some random part always needs to be picked up at the hobby shop and replaced before they can go out and run cars again. And yet, there we were.

As it turns out, the noise was undiagnosed, and eventually went away on its own. We had tremendous fun.

Liv’s birthday party was on Thursday. I was a walking zombie. It’s hard to post pictures of a wild and crazy party while politely omitting pictures of kids whose families may not want them seen on the internet. So you get a blurry, cropped photo of the party. And yes, that’s totally a grocery store cake. I didn’t want to spring $50 for an ice cream cake again (that caught me off guard the first time. Mercy). So it was my intent to make a cake for Liv and serve ice cream along side. Then I got sick, yadiyada, and in the end, Nate went to the store and bought one. It didn’t even say “Happy Birthday” on it. But it looked festive.

It’s been snowing on and off since Friday, when my in-laws came over to celebrate her birthday more quietly.

See the snow back there? In the twilight. It was the oddest color as the sun went down.

On Saturday, we took the kids out in the morning, came back for the babysitter, and Nate and I went out in the afternoon to shop for mattresses. Thanks for all the comments and suggestions, by the way. I really appreciate it. We first went to Kasala and tried their Celsius foam mattress.

Then we went to Sleep Country and tried the Temperpedics. Wowza. They’re expensive. Especially when you add the groovy adjustable base part. Nate tried the Sleep Number while I was still on a Temperpedic and didn’t like it at all, so I didn’t bother trying it. We went back to Kasala to try the Celsius again, and bought it. It’s warranted for 20 years, we get a 30 day trial period to try it out, and it was under $1200. They’re supposedly a group that branched off from Temperpedic and think their mattress is better. It has a different foam on the bottom that enables you to put it on a regular box spring, or slatted bedframe, or whatever. To me, it feels firmer than the Temperpedics, but it’s still completely comfortable. It felt good. It arrives Saturday, and I’m excited.

So, Saturday evening was rather mellow. I’d say quiet, but it wasn’t really quiet. Liv played with her new toy.

The girls read.

Clark admired the new electronics.

Yesterday evening, Clark was blowing bubbles on the front porch and watering flowers. I swear I didn’t set these photos up with the perfect colors and everything. I walked by and saw it and ran for the camera. It was so beautiful.

In this photo, he looks JUST like me at that age

Veronica read,

and then the girls came home from softball practice

And that brings us to today, when I’m still tired and not feeling well. But people are coming over at 12 and I have a guitar lesson this afternoon.

And finally, (I’m wrapping it up, I swear), my very good friends at The Web Flipper are going to be updating my site so I can post audio files, so you can hear me sing and attempt to play the guitar. So if the blog is down for awhile in the near future, that’s why.

As with Madrona last year, there’s just so much to talk about, it’s overwhelming. It was fantastic. I’m finding that when I’m out and doing, I don’t want to bother to stop and take photos, so I don’t have many.

BUT, I’m 10 rows away from finishing the Angel Shawl.

I worked on it a lot at Madrona in the downtime. I ended up adding one more repeat than I meant to, but that’s ok because I don’t want to overly block and stretch it out. The stitches have an amazing, three dimensional texture to them. The swirling stitches are raised above the circle of yarnovers in the center, and they look like waves. I’m hoping it will still do that after it’s blocked.

So, a couple highlights…

I looked around the ample marketplace for a shawl pin I liked and couldn’t find anything I thought I’d wear, (though many were cute), until the teacher’s gallery/show on Friday night.
Ruth Sorensen’s display was stunning, and she had 6 or so shawl pins attached to a swatch. I hadn’t seen them in the marketplace and asked her about them. She said that her husband had just started making them from some kind of horn, and that they’d be on her website soon.

I asked if she’d sell me one that night.

She said yes.

I ran upstairs to my room

(where poor Hayden was spending a quiet, solitary evening because she got sick on some bad coffee creamer)

and grabbed some cash.

I bought two.

They’re. Gorgeous.

And reversible.

And look quite nice on the scarf I’m making for my brother.

Next, one of the things I was MOST excited to see was the Philosopher’s Wool booth. If you recall, I was quite smitten with their book and technique back in October/November, and was thrilled when I saw them on the vendor list.

I met and talked with both Ann and Eugene for great lengths of time. They’re incredible, beautiful people, and extremely kind. Have you been around people whose kindness is physically tangible? When you can literally feel it just by standing next to them and making eye contact?

Anyway, it was quite an experience, and I loved it.

I bought a kit in the Navajo colorway

to make a Kilim shawl from the book I bought.

Ann took my picture in a striped, garter stitch shawl on display in their booth.

And despite the fact that I really don’t like garter stitch, it was gorgeous and it felt incredible.

I’m very excited to make my shawl. It’s looking to be the year of shawls for me, and I’m ok with that.

Anyway, moving on, I bought a Mother Mackenzie dye kit,

went to the banquet where the Eastside Spinners sat together and listened to Judith’s fascinating talk on bison in the United States, (the picture won’t load for some reason), and had an overall, fantastic time.

The classes were great, the hotel was very cool, they over booked the hotel and had to put us in a suite, which explains the swanky pictures above. I didn’t pay full price for that fancy room, but it sure was cool. It had TWO bathrooms! What hotel room has TWO bathrooms? Considering Hayden got sick, it turned out to be quite convenient.

Poor dear.