It was only a matter of time

...before I bought a sheep. The wooly part of one, anyway.  My roommate (modeling the tarp full of wool above) and I bought a beautiful Corriedale fleece at Black Sheep Gathering last month. The fleeces were pretty picked over by the time we got there on Sunday, but I'm really happy with the quality of the one we got. It got 6th place in the Corriedale category. I barely had to skirt it-- I just separated out the parts with more VM from the parts with less and didn't throw anything away.

Peanut supervised the process. Her fur coordinates with the fleece so well.

 I washed and combed the first batch. It's really pleasant to take this:

To this:

To this:

The 2-ply sample is about fingering weight. A 3-ply or 4-ply would be a really nice sweater yarn, I think.

Also, my flax is so happy! It's actually shed the flowers and gone on to seedpods since this picture was taken. It's doing so well that I'm thinking of accidentally spilling a bag of flax seed all over the yard next year.

Seedlings!

You guys! I've got plants! They're so cute! I'm trying to grow cotton and flax this year, because that seemed like a reasonable compromise to keeping a sheep in the backyard.

The cotton is so charismatic!

Most of the cotton plants are slick-seeded pima, with a few green cotton seedlings. I got the seeds from Cotton Clouds. The flax is just good old Bob's Red Mill flaxseed from Fred Meyer since the fancy plant store only had the ornamental type. I figure, if I am really, really lucky with my crops, I will be able to make a very fancy washcloth and probably not much else. The flax should grow really well here, it's the processing that will be the trick. The cotton. . . well, we'll see. It needs hot weather to bloom and then the boll has to dry on the plant before you pick it. Not sure if that's going to happen here in the PNW.

The flax

Also have some ridiculous chickens. Sometimes I like to just sit outside and watch the chickens. I call it the chicken meditation. They say, when you mediate, you're supposed to empty your mind, and, well, there is not much emptier than the mind of a chicken. Unless it is many chickens, all together.

Marshmallow, either Poppy or Darjeeling, and Rock Band in the foreground.

Toast says HI.
I think this is the day I found out that chickens are very interested in orange nail polish.

Since the cotton and flax will take a while, I spent last weekend spinning and weaving some stash. After fighting with cotton and hemp, it's nice to sit down at the wheel with some bouncy superwash merino and just spin. Also worked on this yardage, the draft is #360 from The Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns. I like my new end-feed shuttle very much, but you will notice I have cleverly cropped the picture to hide my crappy selvedges anyway. I'm having some tension problems with this warp and even though end-feed shuttles are supposed to make it look like angels have kissed the edges of your cloth, they can't fix everything. This will probably be some fabric for tote bags.

Also a reed-sleying error. Right. In. The. Middle.

Why do I do this to myself?

Handwoven Nov/Dec 2010. Isn't that pretty? Now that I have an 8-shaft loom, I thought I'd tackle something more ambitious than dishtowels. It's made of 12 colors of embroidery floss woven in doubleweave blocks with black to make a rainbow windowed scarf. You separate the floss into the 6 strands and sley at 60 epi. It's insane.

Paige has been very helpful throughout this process.

But pretty. Anyway, I went out and bought three hundred billion little skeins of embroidery floss (The lady at Joanns scanned them individually. The receipt was more than 4 feet long.) and wound them onto bobbins. The article recommended you warp front to back, so front to back it was. I sleyed the reed pretty quickly, threaded slowly, and looked at the bobbins hanging in a tangled mess off the front beam and thought about what a bitch this would be to beam. And yea, verily, a bitch it is.

I hit a snag last night. Or rather, many tiny snags. Everything was twisted in front of the heddles before I had gotten even 2 inches through, and there was no way I could beam that. So I'm pulling it all out of the heddles so I can beam through the reed, then re-thread and re-sley at the end. The efficient and time-honored warping method of front to back to front again to oh god why. We'll see how this goes.

Cuttlefish Friend

I made a cuddlefish. He's based on the Australian Giant Cuttlefish, only about double the size and of course made in polarfleece.

If you have 5 minutes, watch this video about cuttlefish. If you have an hour, watch this:


It is completely worth it, I've seen it like three times. The image above is a tiny cuttlefish known as the striped pyjama squid, which is the cutest thing and the cutest name and is just begging for a Halloween costume. Highlights include the strobe light thingy some do to mesmerize their prey and a description of the mating habits of the Australian Giant Cuttlefish. This involves the larger males trying to out-bro each other with crazy color displays while the smaller males sneak past, disguised as female cuttlefish so they can nonchalantly hand a female their packet of sperm without anybody noticing. Cross-dressing color-changing cephalopods! How can you not enjoy it?

Anyway, this all started when I saw a link to instructions on making your own giant squid pillow. I modified the pattern pieces to be more cuttlefish-like (all that research turned in finding documentaries and running around the house pretending to be cuttlefish, which is difficult when you have a rigid skeleton and no color changing abilities) and stuffed the thing with the filling of two old pillows and a 32 oz bag of polyfill.

Housemates disguised as plaid cuttlefish are optional, but encouraged.

 You can see the shape of the cuttlefish pattern pieces here. I did away with the bobbles on the ends of the tentacles because they were hard to turn right side out, and I sadly didn't go with the idea of elasticized feeding tentacles. This is missing the frill and an oval piece of the sucker fabric for the bottom of the head. I just sort of looked at the squid pattern and drew a cuttlefish instead. There was some measuring, but since my seam allowance turned out to be "you know, whatever" it did not matter very much.

So, when it was done, we decided to take him for a walk.

Introduced him to the chickens and the cat.

Took many silly pictures with our new Cuttlefish Friend.

All dressed up for Halloween

He's very cuddly. This whole project was a resounding success.