level 2-lust (ridicule)
that’s not the clearest of the lot, but it captures the color the best. picture is prewash and set.
164 yards (approximately) at 16-18 wpi pre-wash, making it light fingering/heavy lace. spun on an ashford student spindle. handdyed babydoll wool.
ridicule took roughly 2 weeks time including dyeing.
164/600+ yards (inferno project)
164/500 yards (june spin down)
i literally have more spinning projects than spindles currently, and my plan for june is to address that.
my current spinning list
level 1-sunset
level 2-ridicule
duckish/clarity
smoke rings
purple/new berlin
pisces
acidic pumpkin/cable ply
the meadows/low whorl
those are just the yarns that i’m working on. planned i have:
ember (level 3)
phoenix (level 4)
ridicule re-work (left overs recarded and overdyed, level 5-or yarn for matching mitts, depending on yardage)
the chesire cat
natural marl (grey and brown fleeces)
natural marl (brown and red)
inferno marl (ember and phoenix, level 6)
re-cyle (rainbow dyed)
starry night
the silk my mom got me
the green and black alpaca
current june plan
to get as much yarn spun as possible without starting new projects. i want to have at least 500 yards of finished yarn by the end of june. that means spun, plied, and preferably finished. no new projects can be started until 500 yards have been recorded. one spindle will be kept empty for plying. projects can be rotated through at will.
fiber can be purchased and prepped, but no new projects can be started. yardage will be recorded from memorial day on.
I try to avoid two entries so close together…but the sun came out.
ridicule and duckish
90% worth of the first half of the singles for ridicule. the color isn’t capturing great and i wish i had thought to grab a shot of the fleece before i carded it. the duckish is capturing roughly right. i wish they weren’t so blurry (and these are with the anti-distortion filter on my camera).
duckish
ridicule
i’m not sure why these came out so blurry and if i hadn’t spent 45 minutes fighting with my camera this morning to get them off the disk in the first place i would reshoot them.
clarity
the last of the stuff i dyed for clarity. the only other yarn going into the shawl will be duckish.
clarity
more yarn for clarity- a new skein on the left, one of the original skeins on the right.
clarity fleece
dyed fleece for clarity. some was used as dye soppers, and some was carded into the wool for the base yarn. some was overdyed purple and became duckish.
my spinning has been gifted a new name. i also got upgraded to commerical spinner, as well, without my knowledge sometime in the recent past.
i was sitting at the bus stop today working on ridicule (which has been an insanely fast moving project. i’m almost done with the first half of the singles) when this man came up to me and asked me what i was knitting.
well i wasn’t knitting i told him.
he asked me what i was making.
i told him yarn for a shawl.
he asked me if i meant the thing people wear over their shoulders.
yes, that would be it.
he told me that he wanted to buy one and asked for my contact info.
he then asked me for my business name.
i told him it didn’t have a name.
he told me that i was in luck. he was a photographer (with a camera he refered to as masculine) but his day job was in marketing. he gifted me with a name.
i am now….katiespin.
it’s a better name than i could come up with, i suppose.
who was withholding the knowledge that knitpicks now carries wheels??? i’m supposed to be pricing roving for my class, not pricing wheels. i do have it narrowed down between halcyon and knitpicks. it may come down to shipping, because halcyon has a wider range of fibers and i can order full pounds without a problem. knitpicks is cheaper but i’m not sure how much shipping for a pound of roving will end up being. i want to snag light fiber for blending for myself as well and i don’t want white which means i want to try out halcyon.
i may end up with orders to both places because knitpicks carries batts too.
anyway. we went and saw the fourth pirates movie yesterday (sunday).
i have to say that i think it’s my favorite of the 4, but it’s also the weakest if that makes sense. it does feel a little flat and a little forced. and depp is showing his age, not that that’s a problem for me at all. but i also thought it had the most interesting storyline of all of them and it was surprisingly original (again with my elves and velocoraptor issue-how many times can you use the same movie monsters before you resort to interjecting random creatures into the storyline?); the siren/mermaid thing was really interesting.
i REALLY like the physical magick they had going on. as in, i could see it actually working like that. it wasn’t overdone and it didn’t feel all that forced. my only issue is that it seemed to be this excalibur type (soul eater style) thing going on; whoever held the focal item was the one that could use it regardless of who they were instead of the focal point being tied to an individual. i guess you can’t win them all and that’s such an insanely small point to get stuck on.
i liked the anne bonny aspect that they had going too. it took me a minute and a run through of my bpal collection in my head (sadly) to realize that a woman on a pirate ship wasn’t all that unheard of. as in, the set up was a little goofy and i wish she was a stronger character but it wasn’t all that far off of a situation that may actually have happened. i liked that they avoided the most obvious set up as well.
it was a dark film by disney standards which i appreciated. there were a few death scenes that were sort of shrugged away. i guess i felt like it was a throwback to the black cauldren and the horned king. there some details that i was actually suprised and pleased to see in there as a folklore/history buff (blackbeard actually did supposedly run around with a braided beard that he had a habit of setting on fire…).
it wasn’t a great film though. depp seemed a little halfhearted through the middle chunk. the movie didn’t really set up location all that well; one minute you were in one place and then you were in the next place with an assumption that you knew what was going on. the main romantic line was actually interesting but it seemed forced and the climax of that thread was slightly more confusing than i think it was intended on being. and ending seemed to suggest a fifth movie which would just be painful. i also didn’t like it in imax. i think i would have been happier with a conventional showing. it was a really pretty movie to look at but i think the imax took away from it.
"Venus and Mars" by Sandro Botticelli
Level 1: Limbo-Sunset
Level 2: Lust-Ridicule
Level 3: Gluttony
Level 4: Avarice
Level 5: Wrath
Level 6: Heresy
Level 7: Violence
Level 8: Fraud
Level 9: Treason
So. Aphrodite. The goddess of physical beauty and sexual attraction, among other things. She was married to the Greek god of the forge, Hephaestus, except that it was sort of an unbalanced match. She was the perfect woman and he was about as ugly as that pantheon came.
Aphrodite and Ares, the god of war, fell madly in love with each other or at least experienced a deep physical attraction for each other that ended up producing children. For some reason it seems that the past few years have made Ares the under dog here, and people seem to want to have Aphrodite excused for her behavior. This isn’t how i remember the myth going and like it or not Aphrodite was cheating.
Hephaestus however didn’t exactly take this in stride. He got his own. The couple was caught together on several occasions, by Helios the sun god at least once. Hephaestus may not have had physical appearance going for him but he was exceptionally smart and he devised a trap to ensnare the two while they were doing their thing behind his back. thus bringing down the ridicule of the other gods onto the couple.
Again for some reason the way i remember the mythos going and the way that it’s popping up online isn’t matching up. It seems that now people want to frame Aphrodite as being stuck in a loveless marriage with a man that she hates but the way i was initially taught the myth was that she ends up growing quite fond of her husband.
I’m still working on the sunset alpaca for level 1 but i’m really sick of the purple wool i’ve been spinning so i’m moving on to the babydoll that i dyed last week for level two. I’m calling this one Ridicule. i’m going to do a randomish 5 color stripe that i’m going to 2 ply. (pink-red-cider-orangegreen-orangeyellow). and probably overdye orange.
picture from toplyfiberarts
*i haven’t been posting food waste friday entries because i haven’t been cleaning out the fridge. i wish that meant that i had no food waste…no, i just haven’t been cleaning out the fridge. i really need to do that. along with getting all the clothes put away, pick up the living room, clean my kitchen counters and sort out yarn.
i would like to say that i was bad and that i feel guilty. except that i don’t think that i am and i don’t. see that glorious ball of fluff? it’s now mine.
mine mine mine.
i started looking at fibers for my inferno shawl. i really want to be able to get as much spun as fast as possible so i’m buying some fiber with each paycheck, if possible. it’s kettle dyed polworth called phoenix from toplyfiberarts. i was going to get fiber from slimchicken again but i really fell in love with that one, and it was only a couple of dollars more expensive for slightly more fiber.
i was talking about this on cpaag last night, and it turns out the designer of the pattern i want to use is on the group. it also turns out that the pattern is called scrample but that’s neither here nor there. anyway she’s really excited about the thought of this project. i’m getting really pumped up for this.
should i tell mid about the horror knits group on ravelry? should i tell him it was one of the first groups i joined?
with an unexpected stretch of free time (lunch took less time than i thought) yesterday i started dyeing for my inferno shawl.
i ended up doing four batches. over my medium natural fleece i did:
– 1 packet of strawberry and 1 packet of orange (dark orange red)
– 1 packet of orange and 1 of lemonade (sort of a splotchy yellow orange with a lot of natural showthrough)
– 1 packet of lemon lime and 2 packages of orange (darker orange rust with showthrough)
– something the mccormick box calls spiced cider- 6 drops orange and 1 drop black (sort of a rusty orange).
i’m fighting with this black. i dyed a batch of yarn for clarity on sunday with that black that came out more rust than purple.
i may overdye the yarn with a solid orange again once i get it spun up, if it ends up not being bright enough. i was going to dye several yarns out of the fleece for this shawl but i think i want a wider range of textures for it so i’ll probably grab some other rovings from different places.
if the light was better i would take some pics of this batch but it’s not. maybe this weekend.
here’s a thematically appropriate pic from morguefile instead:
drool....
monday sucked.
when my days suck a couple of things happen. i retreat into a happy place as fast as possible, and i daydream.
my daydreams center around two things: the never to be published novel that i’m writing, and fiber arts. the first has been described fanfic either gone horribly wrong or horribly right depending on your stance because i’m taking as many tv tropes as i can and just forcing them all to work along with all the bad ideas i can collect from different sources. but that’s for a different entry.
the other, the fiber arts, are what’s important here.
in bullet points:
– i love orange. LOVE orange. well, i tend to be drawn to rich warm toned rovings in general but i really love oranges.
– i love shawls.
– i love fire, fire energy, all of that.
– i will start one major project before i can finish another.
– i read the divine comedy in high school and referring to things as various levels of hell has worked itself into a permanent place in my vocabulary.
i could have sworn that i had come across a dante/inferno themed pattern on ravelry but the only thing i found was a pair of socks.
i did however find malaise’s scrapple shawl, which was designed for small amounts of handspun.
so my next major project, after the clarity shawl is finished, is this: i want to knit a hell-shawl. heh. but seriously this is the idea: one skein of blazingly warm yarn for each level of hell, knit into this horrible, wonderful mess of a shawl. hopefully in time for rhinebeck.
hopefully.
this post should have had a photo but my computer seems to have eaten it.
I should admit for the sake of full disclosure that one of the few movie-folklore-pop culture monsters that i don’t enjoy are zombies. well that’s not true. i enjoy the theory behind them- the fear of the lose of self, the fear of society turning a person into a drone, a fear of a lose of control to an unstoppable force. but i would rather read the horrible sounding book discussed on ontdcreepy with the vampires versus the shapeshifting dinosaurs than read zombie fiction. i don’t mind all zombies. i liked dead snow and army of darkness (but not the first two evil dead movies). in terms of classic films i liked white zombie, even with all the controversy surrounding whether or not that’s too racially charged a film and if it’s even part of zombie cannon (though i did see it on cable television when i was in high school, i think on either tmc or amc so it’s not -that- charged). i like watching people play left 4 dead, and don’t get me started on silent hill.
i should further admit that this weekend was full of zombies.
yarn zombies.
saturday it poured. i went to the elmwood farmer’s market saturday morning, because if rhinebeck has taught me anything, an outside event that has not been cancelled that is also being held in the rain equals less crowds and better selection. i did well. i spent too much money but my splurge purchases were bacon and a tin of this amazing honey based hand cream that was similar to one i’ve been eyeing on etsy. it then rained the rest of the day so i brought out all of my spinning projects.
all of them. including the low whorl spindle i tried to make last spring and failed with, miserably. i shoved it away and turned it into a bobbin, chalking it up to just not being comfortable with a low whorl. for whatever reason it worked this time, and i now have a concrete friendly spindle (as per amy of respect the spindle fame’s suggestion- you’ll be much more comfortable ruining a dowl and a toy wheel than a $20 spindle). i’m using fiber i started spinning a year ago with it.
i also went back to knitcore. i’ve been wanting to go back for months but i wasn’t sure how it would go, once i got time. i got multiple questions about where i had been and if i had been okay while i was gone. so apparently i do have a knitting group for reals now. and i somehow volunteered to do the social media end of advertising international knit in public day this year.
Horrific Knits 