You know that someone loves you when they buy you something like this, with the full knowledge that it’s going to be hanging in their kitchen for many years to come.

(You may need to replay the video to get it to display correctly; Vimeo is doing some weird things with it.)

Cow clock from Heather Sarik on Vimeo.

I’ve been weaving, knitting and doing other things like a fiend for the past few weeks. I forgot to get a picture of my grandma’s gift before I mailed it out (dammit!), but here are pictures of some other things I’ve been working on. The person the gift is intended for should not click on the links below. Robin, your picture is not in Flickr, so feel free to look at the mom and dad links.

For various reasons, I haven’t been getting much into the holiday spirit this year. This weekend has been sort of a turning point, and I’m feeling much more chipper these days.

On Friday night, me and Jag went out for comfort food at Elmo’s, did a little shopping on 9th Street, and went out to get a tree from the TROSA folks on Guess Rd.

The full moon was amazing,

Here’s our tree, Fir-gus, all decked out for the season. Jag picked out the gold Moravian star tree topper, which I love. Members of my immediate family will recognize most of the ornaments, I’m sure.

On Saturday, we did more shopping (yay Morgan Imports!) and then in the late afternoon headed over to Jeff and Michelle’s for gaming. It was a very fun session, as usual. Their doggie, Callay, reclined on her area of the sectional sofa with her usual dignified demeanor.

My Etsy store will be closing temporarily for a few months so I can relax over the holidays and get this move thing figured out. Last December, I’m not even sure I even knew what “roving” or “combed top” was. The fact that total strangers have been willing to buy my hand-dyed fiber from me still boggles my mind in a lot of ways. I’m really grateful to everyone who has been a customer and supported my little venture. Based on sales and my current inventory, I’ve created over 60 different fiber colorways. At at least 4oz each, that’s more than 15 lbs of fiber I’ve dyed since August! Not that much compared to people who do this as a serious business, but not bad for someone working out of her kitchen sink.

One of the advantages of the shop closing is that I get to dye for ME again, which I haven’t done for months. I recently got some really nice, soft Shetland fiber, which took the dyes much more vibrantly than I expected. Here they are, and they’re ALL MINE.

I haven’t played Scrabble in ages, so this weekend when I noticed that Jag had a Scrabble set among his piles of games, I challenged him to a match.

My luck with tiles started out bad and didn’t improve much. It turns out that “Eaaaizt” is not a valid word to describe “a follower of Eaaa”.

This set wasn’t much better, unless I had wanted to work in some kind of “Old MacDonald” reference, or possibly the name of an insurance company.

It later became clear that I should have kept the “G” and that I was subconsciously thinking about biscuits.

Despite being left with an unusable “Q”, I squeaked by for a 6-point victory. Here’s the slightly risque finished board. I wonder if some kind of psychological analysis can be done using peoples’ Scrabble words. In case you want to take a stab at it, Jag was responsible for “nude”, “nun”, and “dirt” and I’m on the hook for “teats”, “bolus” and “pox”. And yes, “gi” and “ria” (Jag), and “ye” (me) are all valid words.

Thanksgiving weekend has been whizzing by. On Thursday, there were 6 for dinner at the parental household and the usual yummy feast.

The Thanksgiving table, pre-feast:

I forgot to take pictures of the food before everyone sat down, so here is what you get when you interrupt the munching with your camera flash. We had turkey and gravy, stuffing inside and outside the bird, Robin’s cranberry sauce, Greg’s 2 kinds of green beans (the almond and blue cheese ones were my favorite), Greg’s cornbread, squash casserole and rolls I made, candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, and cole slaw. For dessert, pumpkin pie and a pecan-chocolate-bourbon pie that turned out to be more of a chocolate chip cookie pie. We all ate until we were nearly comatose and waddled home.

Jag and I had a quiet Black Friday at home and didn’t buy anything except some groceries.

I knitted some more on the Dad Secret Project, and finished a hat made from the bottom two Uniquely Yours batts, which were full of sparkly angelina. I had a lot of fun spinning the batts into some wacky thick and thin singles. In general the batts were great, but it turns out that I am not a fan of the multicolored wool neps that were added to the black batt. I spend too much time picking neps OUT of yarn to want to put any IN, and they don’t actually stay spun into the yarn. My house looks like it’s been the site of a rainbow mini-hailstorm, or possibly a tiny clown explosion, and I’m sure the hat will be shedding neps into my hair and the surrounding environment for months to come.

The hat still needs a decorative button on the flap and Jag feels it needs a multicolored pompom, so I have a little more finishing to do before I can wear it. A haircut would help too, since it looks a little ridiculous with all my hair hanging out of it.

I’ve also been working on a Christmas gift for mom and dad, who should *****NOT CLICK HERE*****.

Perl says, “FEED ME”.

When I first heard about the open position at my new employer from HLF (getting a lead on a RTP job from someone in California is pretty funny), I promised that I’d send her some handspun yarn if I got the job. Well, I got the job, and this weekend I managed to spin and ply 2 bobbins in the “Black Watch” roving she picked out. In the meantime, HLF has bought a drop spindle and has been spinning up a storm, but she’s still getting this yarn whether she wants it or not.

This is a bit of a tease, since the yarn was still drying this morning and wasn’t really ready for pictures, but here are some photos of the roving and singles stages:

I have to say, it made a nice, soft, squishy 2-ply. I’ll probably not post the pictures until she gets the package, since it’s more fun for her to wonder what the yarn looks like.

I got my wheel in late July. I’ve knitted up and given away some of my handspun, but I’ve definitely reached the “What the Hell am I Going to Do With This Yarn???” stage of my spinning life. My current pile of no-particular-use-in-mind handspun is shown below. I thought it would take a whole lot longer than this!

Last week was my first week at my new job. My coworkers are all great, my new boss is way cool, and I even already knew a couple of the folks there, but for an extreme introvert like me, a new job is incredibly stressful. Being paraded around to meet people, trying to remember names/titles/roles, trying to get familiar with the environment without being a pest to your new teammates, trying to prove that you’re not an imbecile who just managed to put on a good show during the interview…let’s just say that I was really glad when Friday rolled around.

The one true highlight of the week was, of course, this.

The sick kitty curtailed my social life to a surprising extent, and I was so tired in the evenings I wasn’t really up for much in any case. I did manage to do some dyeing here and there, with the results shown below. I’ve started doing oven dyeing instead of microwave dyeing, and I’m enjoying it a lot. Far less mess, and really great color blending.

I also took the Tropical Sunset superwash merino off my Etsy site and decided to spin it myself. I love very bright colors, and I had a feeling this was another dye job that only its mother could love (I really do love it!). The finished product is a 2-ply, and I’d put the weight at sport or so, although I still need to do the WPI and yardage count. I hope it’s enough for some crazy-ass socks.

The roving:

The yarn:

I neglected to post better pictures of Jag’s weaving project. It really turned out great, especially after washing/blocking, which softened it up amazingly.

After getting back from Virginia, my plans were to vote, then spend the remaining time this weekend cleaning the house, doing laundry, and dyeing up some roving and maybe some knitting/spinning/weaving. I got the voting part done yesterday (after spending an hour standing in line at Triangle Town Center!), but the rest has fallen by the wayside due to an unexpected illness in the kitty herd.

Miranda is the most vocal and social of my 4 cats, and she had been unusually quiet since my return. After I returned from voting, I tried tempting her with a treat, which she took from my hand, chewed on, and spit out while crying. Ditto with some canned food. I got worried, since I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her eat anything since I had gotten in on Thursday, so I called the vet and managed to get an appointment for the same afternoon.

It turns out she has a mouth infection, pretty common in FIV+ kitties. She got some sub-q fluids (mostly to make ME feel better, I think) and antibiotic and painkiller shots at the vet, and now I’ll be sneaking more antibiotics into wet food twice a day for the next 2 weeks. She’s eaten an entire can of the special super-palatable squooshy prescription food since yesterday afternoon (with great gusto!) so I think she’ll be doing much better in a few days once the antibiotics have really kicked in. She was feeling well enough to escape from her quarantine area in the downstairs bedroom last night, because I woke up this morning to find her curled up in bed beside me. At least I know she has no hard feelings about being stuffed into the carrier yesterday.

In the meantime, some fiber progress. Jag finished up his weaving project, so I promptly claimed the loom and worked on an experimental project with warp stripes. I used the only skein of Noro I’ve ever bought as weft, plus all but a few yards of a skein of Paton’s merino in purple and most of a skein of silver-gray Elann Highland wool for the warp. I was pretty tired and slapdash while working on this, so I’m more pleased with the colors than the technical execution, but I still love it. And I know now that I absolutely have to weave a wool blanket now. After washing and blocking, this is the softest, warmest table runner ever! I have big plans for buying a bag or 2 of closeout yarn at WEBS or Elann for the blanket.

My recent spinning has involved 2 more 2-ply yarns. The first is the “Biff Spilled Sangria in the Swimming Pool Again” BFL, which I spun into a fingering weight yarn that I planned to use as sock yarn. It’s actually too thin for my taste, as I prefer heavier sock yarns, so I may just knit lace with it.

Before and After:

I also dyed up some Louet Coopworth top recently. I was NOT happy with this fiber. It’s full of vegetable matter and it’s in super-thin, raggedy, flat sliver, which IMO is not combed enough and is full of snags and neps. I dyed up 8 oz in 2 colorways, but I just wasn’t going to be comfortable selling this stuff, so I’ve kept it for myself. The first one I dyed in various leftover purples that I squirted randomly over the wool. After spinning, plying, and finishing, I have to admit that it made a pretty nice yarn, softer than expected. It’s a DK-worsted that will make some nice sturdy mittens, I think, maybe with some Kristen Nicholas-style embroidery.

I’ve also finished up part of the Dad Secret Project. Everyone BUT Dad, click here to see .

Jag and I just got back from another mini-vacation in a Virginia state park. This time it was Occoneechee, which is right on Kerr Lake (or Bugg’s Island Lake, if you’re in Virginia). It would be nice to take these vacations in-state, but North Carolina has exactly 2 parks that offer climate-controlled cabins, while Virginia has them in 14 parks, all of which offer online reservations. Our state’s park system is kinda sad and the web sites suck. Also, alcohol is forbidden in NC state parks, whereas Virginia only forbids public use/display. What’s a nice vacation without a glass of wine/mug of beer in the evenings? Sheesh.

It would be hard to overstate how nice the cabins were at Occoneechee. The cabins at Fairystone were adequate; these cabins were simply amazing for a state park facility. Clean, nicely decorated, and supplied with a full kitchen that had nicer appliances than I have at home. The lake views out the back windows/from the back porch were stunning.
For the price (~$100 a night), you can’t beat it. Our cabin had 2 bedrooms (1 queen bed/2 sets of bunks), and they allow pets! Since you can cook all your meals in-house, it would be especially affordable for families with kids.

We brought the loom and spinning wheel, a bunch of food and books, a few bottles of wine, and just hung out. Some nice previous visitor had cut a pile of firewood, which we put to good use, along with the complimentary firewood bundle left at the cabin.

Jag finished his weaving project while we were there, and it looks great. All the closeups I took came out like blurry crap, so I’ll try to take more pictures later on. (I spun up 4oz of Coopworth roving and finished half of a secret knitting project, which I will discuss in a later blog post.)

The back of the cabin faced west, and the sunsets were spectacular.

I love this picture of Jag. It looks like the jacket photo for a novel about The Immigrant Experience. “Young Lars knew that he could not remain in Sweden to take over the family lutefisk business, not when tales of the rich cod fisheries of Canada reached his ears.”

It was pretty windy while we where there,

I found some kites hidden in the back of my car, and we tried playing with those.

If Occoneechee had as many hiking trails as Fairystone, it would be hands-down my favorite park. It has only about 3 miles of trails, and just outside the park border is a 15-mile “multi-use” trail for hiking, horseback riding (there’s an equestrian campground in the park) and mountain bikes. It’s paved with loose gravel, which is really not pleasant to walk on, and during spring/fall there’s hunting allowed in the area, so hikers/riders are advised to wear blaze orange. Does allowing hunting where people are hiking and riding horses (and conversely, encouraging hikers/horses to wander around in a hunting area) seem like a Bad Idea to anyone else?

Despite the few little quirks, I wish we were still there!

Me, Michelle and Jamie drove around 3.5 hours each way on Saturday to visit SAFF, aka the Southeast Animal Fiber Fair, aka A Big Crackhouse For Knitters, Crocheters, Weavers and Spinners. The entire Flickr set of the trip, including videos, can be seen here.

It rained almost the whole way there, and then the skies cleared as we neared the Mecca of Wooliness.

The main vendor floor was 2 levels of awesome.

Yarn, roving, fleeces, spinning wheels, looms, angora bunnies, sheep, goats, alpacas, finished products like hats and shawls and socks and sweaters, buttons and other notions, felted goodies, wool rug-hooking kits, sheep-themed pajamas, sheep paintings, you name it, it was there.

We hit the alpaca barn in the afternoon and saw some real cuties.

Here’s a video of Miss Thang mugging for the camera:

We also got to see an outrageously cute 4-day-old pygmy goat. She wasn’t an orphan, just had a mom overwhelmed with 3 babies, so her human mommy was making sure she got plenty of milk via bottle-feeding.

Here are a couple short videos; my longer video upload to Flickr is stalling, so I’ll try again later.

I ended up with a couple pounds of combed top, including Cormo (a merino/corriedale cross which I’ve been wanting to try for a while now), alpaca, silk and merino/silk blend, and BFL. Also the starts of a rug-hooking hobby, some Brooks Farm mohair/wool yarn, and some gorgeous fabric that was being sold as scraps from a weaver’s studio. No pictures of my haul, since I’m heading to a cabin in the woods for a minivacation.