It’s The Sarah Palin Name Generator.

I would have been “Crunk Petrol Palin”.

Yesterday me, Michelle, Jag and Jamie piled into Michelle’s vehicle and drove out to Liberty, NC for the Rising Meadow Farm Fest. I forgot my camera like a dumbass, but Michelle took some pictures and video.

We watched a sheepdog demonstration, ate lamb burgers (the most delicious, juicy ground lamb I’ve ever had, it beats the crap out of the ground lamb from grocery stores), ate homemade ice cream, listened to a Celtic band doing all the usual Irish pub standards, watched a woman spinning angora straight from her very patient bunny, and did some shopping.

I bought 2 yarns. The top one is wool/cotton/silk/sparkly handspun by Nola Rich, a very nice woman who owns some unusual limited-production all-metal spinning wheels made by Columbine. They look like this. The bottom yarn is Rising Meadows Farm Corriedale singles in spring greens and blues.

I bought some rovings as well. Clockwise from the top middle, 2 balls (2oz each) of Rising Meadow Farm Corriedale roving, ISeeSpots Farm Merino/Silk/Angora blend roving, ISeeSpots Farm black alpaca roving, a new bobbin for my spinning wheel (I was so happy that ISeeSpots is a Kromski dealer and brought a walnut stained bobbin with them!), and Three Waters Farm superfine merino/tencel roving in “Black Hollyhock”.

One of the Unique Sheep ladies was there, handing out little sample skeinlets of their sock yarns. I love their colorways.

It was a good time despite the really hot and humid weather.

During the drive I knitted a dishcloth in an experimental pattern. I wanted something mindless to work on, so I picked an easy pattern (eye of partridge) and gave it a 3-row garter stitch border. It did a great job of breaking up the variegated yarn, and gave a nice solid, squishy cloth, just like a sock heel. I’ll be making up a bunch more of these.

On Monday I bound off the Autumn Bliss Simple Yet Effective handspun shawl; on Tuesday I washed and blocked it, and on Wednesday I wore it to work, despite the weird looks from coworkers. I’m using a dragonfly hair thingy I bought from The Bronze Jewelers at the NC Ren Faire last fall as a shawl pin, since it never did a great job of holding my hair, but seems right at home holding a shawl together.

The shawl is a perfect size for me, not long enough to drag or get caught on things, but big enough to keep me warm in the aggressively chilly A/C at work. And it reaches down to my butt. It’s important that shawls reach down to one’s butt.

I also made my first two Etsy sales! The first one was to a perfect stranger, and the second proves that Celeste is either a wonderful friend or the most obsessed Durannie ever.

I dyed 3 more rovings this weekend (I’ve nearly used up the first big batch of undyed wool top that I purchased) and I’m really happy with all of them. I had definite color themes in mind when I dyed them, and they came out pretty much exactly as I intended. The first is posted on Etsy; the other two I’ll post tomorrow and Tuesday.

The conventional wisdom is that you need to post items frequently in order to stay at the top of product searches, since the most recently posted items come up first. Within 30 minutes of posting “Dogwoods in Bloom”, I had fallen back to Page 2 on a search for “roving”. The hand-dyed roving market, she is quite saturated. I’ve decided to let the listings run their 60-day course and then start poaching for my own use.

Dogwoods in Bloom, Columbia/Dorset:

Pansies, Superwash Merino

Rose Bouquet, Columbia/Dorset

I think I’ve decided that I just don’t like working from home. My employer allows people to work from home up to 2 days a week, and when I received a company laptop (which is a requirement for working off-site) I talked to my boss and scheduled myself for Thursdays. Today was my second go at it, and I just don’t enjoy it. It’s boring and isolating, even with IM and email. I end up chained to the computer out of feelings of guilt that I’m not “really working” if I’m at home and therefore must check email continuously and respond instantaneously in order to prove that I’m being productive. I also miss hanging out with my coworkers much more than I thought. So today may be the last time.

In spinning news, I finished up about 6oz/175g of Columbia/Dorset 2-ply in “Misty Morning”. I was trying for a thicker yarn, and I got about 305 yards, so probably a worsted-ish weight. I love the tight ply, the yarn is like a string of colored beads. Overall, it seems more even than my last attempt. I think I’m slowly improving! No idea yet what this will end up as.

I’m currently spinning up around 4oz of Blue Faced Leicester I bought from an Etsy vendor I like, in some wild bright colors. The long staple length is really interesting to work with, and it’s so soft and shiny. It’s going to end up as another 2-ply; pictures soon.

I’m also plugging away at the handspun shawl. The colors are perfect for fall, so I want to get this finished up so I can start wearing it once it gets colder, maybe over a black turtleneck or long-sleeved scoop neck shirt. I’m finding that the Columbia/Dorset gets softer and softer as it gets farther along in the process, and the knitted fabric is actually pretty nice. I found some lovely non-fussy hammered copper pins on Etsy at MJCopper that might look great with the shawl.

Hopefully Celeste can shed some light on this one.

I dreamed that I was responsible for taking care of a whole bunch of bunnies that were in groups in different parts of my house, except it wasn’t my current house, it was a house I’ve never seen before. They appeared to be wild baby bunnies (very little, with brown fur). I also owned some ferrets that kept wanting to attack the bunnies and I spent a lot of time trying to keep the ferrets away. Also, the bunnies shed their skins periodically like snakes, which freaked me out when I found the first one because I thought the ferrets had killed one of them.

I posted about this on Ravelry, but not on my blog, so here’s a series of photos showing the combed-top-to-finished-yarn progression for about 4oz of merino (soft soft!) that I dyed and spun into a 2-ply yarn. I am fascinated by the way hand-dyed tops/rovings develop into finished yarn. The results are never quite what I expect (in a good way!). And I’m still in the throes of my barber-pole 2-ply obsession; I’ll be spinning 2-ply yarns for some time to come.

I am convinced that the makers of battery-operated CO and smoke detectors must secretly want all of their customers to die of asphyxiation or burn to death.

1.) CO and smoke detectors are programmed with special factory-set timers to hit their low-battery warning state between the hours of 1am and 5am on a work night. Have you ever had one of these devices start its warning chirps at, say, 2pm on a Saturday? Me either.

2.) The battery cases on CO and smoke detectors are not made to be easily opened by bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived people in the wee hours of the night. They require a screwdriver, a chisel, or at least a determinedly-wielded butter knife to pry open, as well as intense illumination to read the “battery compartment instructions”, which were molded in 4-pt barely-raised type that blends perfectly with the rest of the case and is nearly illegible in direct sunlight, let alone the crappy 60-watt bulb in the hallway light fixture you’re standing under, squinting and cursing.

3.) By the time you’ve finally ripped off the battery cover and flung the handful of AAs to the floor to get the incessant, hellish chirping to stop, you’ve broken off some fragile but vital plastic tab that secures the batteries in place and without which the unit will simply not operate. You decide it’s probably time to replace the damn thing with a new one anyway, maybe a hard-wired unit that won’t awaken you at 3am the morning before an important work meeting, so you set it aside and decide to deal with it later. Much later. Months in the future, when your house bursts into flames (or your furnace starts pumping carbon monoxide through the vents), the plans of the evil smoke/CO detector companies come to fruition.

I’ve been dyeing fiber nearly every day for the past week and a half, and I think my cuticles are permanently blue. Nothing has sold yet in the Etsy store; I have nothing to replace, so tonight I’m taking a break. Here are a few of the latest Columbia/Dorset tops I’ve dyed, each in the 5-6oz range. They’ll go up in the store in the next few days; I’m adding new items one at a time as per the advice of other Etsy-ers. Including these I have 5 more already-dyed tops/rovings to add.

African Violets:

Raindrops on Roses:

Field of Flowers:

I’ve noticed that I like the results best when I say, ‘Hey, I have 7 partial containers of dye solution sitting around, let’s mix ’em all up and slap them all over the fiber.”

I’ve been spinning up the Lupin Bandit roving, and I’m about halfway through the second bobbin. If I can get this all spun up, I may get to ply it this weekend.

I’ve also been knitting away on the Simple Yet Effective shawl. To make sure it turns out a reasonable size, I decided to add in random stripes from a skein of brown Fibre Company Terra that I bought last winter to make a scarf for Jag (except that I stupidly didn’t ask what color he wanted, and it turned out he wanted green). It seems to coordinate well with the handspun and I’m getting to use up some really nice stash yarn (it’s a very soft silk/alpaca/merino blend).

After considering a number of patterns, I cast on for a Simple Yet Effective shawl with the Autumn Bliss handspun.

I think a plain garter/stockinette fabric like this will show off the colors much better than something lacy.