Last day of Class

Not, alas, the class I'm teaching which will go on and on and on. . . but the last spinning class (until I sign up for the 3 day intensive. . . ).

And the last class was fun, fun, fun. The highlight was spinning industriously away as the instructor walked around casually tossing bouquets of fiber at us and saying, "Spin this. . . now spin this. . . and this. . ." So I took it home and knit an energized single sampler -- tube. Calling these energized is probably like calling Mt. Rushmore sculpture -- some of them are very wiggly.


From the top (I can't believe anyone but me will find this interesting, but here you go) is a Pollworth teeny bit spun from a lock, baby alpaca, adult alpaca, bamboo, cashmere, tussah (?) silk -- I knit with no air at all, so it's silk rope -- rainbow Merino, acid-dyed Merino maybe with something in it?, Merino-tencel, red-dyed carded Pollworth, something I totally don't remember (merino/silk?), carded Corriedale, plain Merino, combed Corriedale, something light green, and black Blue Faced Leicester.

It was very very very fun. I just came home delighted.

Now I'm trying to get my Ashford to work and am having tension problems but have gotten some helpful advice from the Knitty boards. On the other hand, my enabling spouse has suggested that if I want a really good wheel, I should get one. What a guy! I may yet take him up on it.

In other news, we're considering joining a local gym. I was telling myself all kinds of grumpy things about how only losers pay to exercise, since I can run anywhere and we have things like weights. . . and then we took the younger three there last night. After the older two had played an organized game of Whiffleball, then jumped in the jumpy house under supervision, while the baby had tolerated the group care room adequately, then after we'd worked out we took them to the climbing wall, where Thing 2 scampered to the top, then Thing 3, thanks to a nice employee who would belay them (the baby then yelled, "Now meeeeee!" and I told her that you had to be two to climb in a harness), and I realized the magic words:

Child Care

They offer two included hours of child care every day. This for a monthly fee which equals what I would pay a teenager for three hours a week of babysitting. So it's exercise, personal trainer time, child care, climbing and please please please exhausted children at night, all within biking distance, for the same money.

I'm sold.

One Without Holes

But not, of course, without lumpy places. This is still my first handspun. The brown yarn is coming along, and the pieces for my Traveller came. I now have an installed drive band, but I need to do something to adjust it. The take-up isn't working correctly, and it's suddenly hard to treadle. Thank goodness class is tomorrow. I can get some expert help. Turns out that through the miracle of ribbing and stockinette, this hat fits me and all the children.


That innocent little face? Last night, Thing 1 stumbled over him and his sister on her way to put the chickens away at 9:15 or so. The chickens had already been put away, thanks to my two middle children, who had climbed out their window with a blanket, two pillows, and handfuls of library books to sleep on the lawn. They had also gathered an impressive array of weaponry, in case raccoons showed up: a couple of pitchforks, some hand sized weights, a trowel or two. . .

They hadn't counted on us carrying them in asleep before the automatic watering system kicked in.

Sigh.

Does it count as a sweater?

I've been practicing plying again, since I'm such a dutiful student. Also, I'm almost out of the black wool and I don't want to run out. So instead of playing with my long draw, I plied.

And then, what to do with those two bobbins of two-ply? Knit, of course. I still don't like the yarn; it's nothing like I'd buy. But it made a dandy tea cozy. Here it is keeping my Mariage Frères' "Bourbon" warm.



If I could count it as a sweater -- hey, it has ribbing and shaping -- instead of a hat, which it also resembles, I'd be a bit closer to my 12/12 goal. And I still have half a bobbin and a skein of this stuff left. Maybe I will make a hat for someone. Without spout and handle openings, though.

Practice makes. . . yarn

Well, there are benefits to obsessing about spinning while doing housework mental practice. Here are two balls -- the smaller one being more recent than the bigger one. Improvement? I think so.


Then last night I broke out the black Blue Face Leicester (say that three times quickly). It's really a gray-brown, but I'm tickled no matter what the color. Much nicer:


I'm not getting unalloyed help from the residents of the house, though. I had to chase him away and finally put the fiber up where he couldn't get it, since even sacrificing a little bit to him didn't help. He also tries to bite the yarn before it winds onto the bobbin. I ordered the final bits for my wheel, plus some fiber. I know, I know, but I'm almost out of what I got at class.


Oh, on the bee front, I think I'm making progress. That hive with the wonky comb was really preying on my mind. Then a friend from the bee group called and told me that she thought it would be easiest to get the queen and put a divider between some straight comb and the crooked comb. Keep the queen on the straight comb, which is in short supply in that hive, and the workers would raise the remaining brood in the wonky comb and then use it for honey storage, while I could concentrate on setting them up to keep straight comb coming in the other part of the hive. The queen isn't one to run around too much, so if she were happy where she was, it would work fine.

The day I planned to work on it, I'd visited two other hives and hadn't seen those queens at all. Some days I can, some I can't. Thing 2 was being a fantastic help by keeping the smoker lit. I stink at that. But she couldn't see the queen either. Then I called in my reinforcements - Thing 1. Although she grumbled, she put on the veil and gloves, walked over to the hive, looked as I raised up a bar of comb, and said, "There she is." Sure enough, there she was. So we moved her over and sealed off the other side. Fingers crossed! I'm not going to check until all the brood in the back should have hatched out, though, so I need to doublecheck how long that should be.

Meanwhile, I have some work to do both for work and on some, well, knitting.

On the Edge

So San Francisco has one edge that faces the Pacific -- the edge of the whole continent, in fact. Recent tide action has revealed some of a clipper ship that ran aground in 1878. So I took three of the Things out there with their cousins to see the ship. We hoped it would look like this:


But instead it was like this:


The kids had more fun sliding down the dunes, but I thought the prow alone was pretty neat. he beach was ridiculously cold, though. Not my idea of a fun time. Give me the bay beaches any day.

Yesterday's spinning lesson was on plying. I'm still not thrilled with the results, but I dutifully plied. I'm still working on setting up my Traditional, and I'm looking forward to learning on that. Spinning is cutting into my knitting time at home (always in short supply anyhow). I don't know how I'm going to get anything done, let alone the sweater I'm two months behind on.


But I did, while out of the house, get this much done on an edging for the green raglan. I have doubts about the fit, doubts about the suitability of this as an edging, but it's not my call at this point. My duty is to knit on, and on, on the edge and beyond.

Adventures All The Time

Last night was the bee meeting. It's a pretty loose affair, or as my power-mad self sometimes thinks, a ridiculous mess. Anyhow, there are many nice things going on. One of which is that I knit because the chaotic nature of the meeting makes me crazy. Imagine the raglan about an inch longer than the last picture. Got it? Okay.

Well, the swarm that had had rocks thrown at it seemed to not have a queen the last time I checked. Probably the suburban delinquents had gotten her. So at the meeting, I asked one or two other keepers about a place to order a queen from. Later in the meeting, a member said, "I had two queens hatch out and I only need one. Anyone need a queen?"

I raised my hand. So she reaches into her shirt pocket and draws out a small cardboard box -- maybe the size little tiny firecrackers come in -- bigger than a matchbox, but not much, and says, "Here." Heeee.

I couldn't keep her alive overnight because the temperatures were (thank the Lord) going to drop. I had to hive her that night. The hive is at my sister's house in the opposite direction from home from the bee meeting. I didn't have any clothes with me because I'd borrowed my spouse's non-beemobile car. It was 10:00. My sister was out; my brother in law wasn't answering the phone because he was either getting the boys to bed or asleep. Still, the bees command.

I talked to my sister and she told me how to sneak into the yard. All the way there, I held the box against my skin so the queen wouldn't die. It's hard to focus on your driving when you're thinking about a queen in a box.

Once there, I suited up (bees don't like being messed with at night) and crept into the yard. Right past the bedroom where my brother in law was reading. So I said, "Hi! It's me. Just putting a queen in the hive!" He cracked up.

So I did. Up the rickety ladder to the top of the shed, lifted the hive cover, irritated noises from the bees, loosened the box a little, and just hung it between the bars. Hopefully they'll feed her and chew her free. Then, because she's a virgin, just-hatched queen, she'll learn to fly near the hive, get the lay of the land, and take a mating flight. If all goes well, she'll go back to what will by then be home and lay lots of eggs and make the hive queenright.

And at 6:00 this morning, the swarm I'd started gathering yesterday was all snug in the box. I just drove up, wrapped it in a sheet, and took off. That's why I prefer morning. Yesterday when I started with them, I was, as Eddie Izzard says, "Covered in bees!" They didn't like being brushed off that branch into the box at all. And it was quite hot, and they were all over, and the kids were locked in the car that I was using as a ladder waiting to go to the lake and they were quite hot too.

This morning was much more civilized. If you ignore getting up at 5:30. Plus, the road had spectacular views of San Francisco Bay, which was, in addition to the bees, worth the price of admission. I sang all the way home.

After getting the children up and fed, assembling all of my needs in the car, we headed out to the new bees' home.
First I did the drill: "What do you if a bee gets out while we're driving?"
"We tell you."
"Do you scream?"
"Noooooooo."
"What do I do?"
"Roll down the window."
"And the bee?"
"Flies out the window."
"Good. Off we go."

Set up the hive, opened the box, dumped them in the hive, and -- bees everywhere!

Folks in the suits are the homeowners. They're going to board the bees for me.


Soon they settled down in the hive quite nicely and even found a nice bed of lavender.


After we did some schoolwork, I found a bit of time to spin. Unfortunately, Thing 4 declined her nap, so it was "spinning" punctuated with "Please don't touch that. Please!" Maybe I'm getting better. Maybe not.

Well, honeycomb takes time for the bees, so I expect yarn will take time for me.

You spin me right round, baby. . .

My first spinning class was on Sunday, and it was (surprise!) horribly frustrating. I ended up renting an Ashford Joy because she didn't like the way my Babe's Fiber Garden PVC wheel was running. I have seen lovely lace spun on it, but not by me!

Since that inauspicious beginning, I've been practicing about 45 minutes each evening, and it's getting marginally easier. I'm working on both long-draw and a pretty pathetic-looking over the fold technique. Hopefully by next Sunday's class, I'll be more proficient.

Around here, things are booming. Spouse and I went out sort of for our anniversary and watched the Phillies beat the Giants. It was a good game, and due to the freakishly warm weather, a nice evening out at the park, rather than the Arctic-like conditions that usually obtain. The woman behind us prattled on indefatiguably in a rather carrying voice. Not loud, just unignorable. So, I knit. And I'm past the sleeves now!


To relieve the tedium of a Very Plain Wool Sweater, I think I'm going to do a horizontal cable bottom, and either knit the top of the sweater on to it or sew it on. I do, however, have to make myself finish the sleeves before I do that. Less knitting to flop around and around.

More bees!

This is the best hive I have going right now. They used to just be a ball of bees, but now they've drawn out a lovely bunch of comb. I need to go in there soon and spread it out a little bit. Another gratuitous shot?


This is more like what a wild hive would look like -- this is the view from below, through the screen bottom. I may have to cover it a little in the winter, but in summer it helps with ventilation. That's about 18" of combs. The smaller ones are newer. I just got a call to go and get another swarm. Yay! I'll start getting it today and then finalize the pick up early tomorrow morning. Thing 2 is out painting the last hive right now. I'll install it at a friend's house after I pick it up.

I promise pictures of my new yarn when it looks more like yarn to me. Right now it's more like interspersed roving and thread -- very much a thick-thin effect! And I'm still working so hard on my classwork when I get a free minute that my computer time is slim. If I haven't commented on your blog, it's partly because half the time right now Blogger won't let me leave comments and partly because I'm just not keeping up with reading. Thank you all for comments. I really appreciate them but also have not been responding.

I just realized I'm asking people to forgive me for just being rude. Okay, so that's what I'm asking. Sorry. Soon I'll be back to my normal self. Whoever she is!