The Fiber Event | Through The Yarny Curtain

WIP Wednesday: January 3, 2018

This week, I’m sharing my two active projects. I have a lot of WIPs / UFOs that are sitting around, waiting for me to get to them. As part of the inventory that I blogged about on Monday, I will be making sure Ravelry is up-to-date with those projects.

SassyBee Orchid

My current spinning project is two batts of SassyBee Orchid on Polwarth.

SassyBee Fibers (this is a link to her FB page as her website isn’t active) is a vendor at The Fiber Event in Greencastle, Indiana, which I have attended for the last 3 or 4 years. I love her batts and I have a pile of them. In fact, all the batts in the suitcase full of batts, pictured in Monday’s post about inventory, are SassyBee batts. In addition, one of the big bins in the big pile of bins is full of SassyBee batts. They are so beautiful, but I had not spun any of them. In fact, I had never spun from a batt at all. On the first Friday in December, I spent the day spinning as a demo during the Weavers of Orlando Annual Holiday Sale. My wheel was empty, so I grabbed a SassyBee batt and spun that the entire day. I’ve spun a little more on it since, but not a lot due to the holidays. I’m about 3/4 of the way through the first batt.

Mesa

Last year, my LYS had an Anzula trunk show. This cape (available on Ravelry) was one of the sample items Anzula brought with them as part of the show. I tried it on and loved it. I also thought my mother would love it. I bought the yarn and the pattern and intended to finish it for her birthday in March. Then for Mother’s Day in May. Then for Christmas. I only have about 10 rows of knitting left, then I have to weave in the ends, sew on buttons, and block it.

On the Road

When last I wrote, Tiger was about to start radiation therapy. I expected the weeks of radiation to be difficult for all involved, and for things to get easier after. While the radiation was challenging, Tiger came through with flying colors and I thought the hard part was behind us. I was wrong.

Tiger caught a cold. Then our other cat, Puck, started having health issues. Within a week, I thought we would lose both cats. Over the last month, I’ve spent many nights sleeping on the couch so I could provide medicine and food at all hours of the night, without disturbing Chris’s sleep. Tiger recovered and is doing fabulously. Puck passed over the rainbow bridge sometime last night. I will write a more detailed post about all of this, along with a slideshow tribute to Puck, in a couple weeks.

Driving and More Driving
Months before the cats got sick, I had planned an epic trip. I embarked on that trip this past Tuesday. The first leg of the trip was a 14.5 hour drive from Orlando to Greencastle, Indiana to visit my friend Stacy and attend The Fiber Event. My plan was to leave at 6:00 am, so that I could drive through Atlanta in the middle of the day when traffic is more likely to be light, and to drive as long as I remained alert. I expected to stop and stay in a hotel at some point.

I did leave my house at 6:05 am and arrived in Atlanta around 1 pm. I had no traffic slow downs in Atlanta — the first time I’ve had that happen when driving through the area. By 2:30 pm, I was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and starting to feel too sleepy to drive. It seemed too early to stop for the day, so I pulled into a McDonalds parking lot and took a nap for 1/2 hour. I felt much refreshed, so I got back on the road.

I arrived in Nashville around 5:00 pm. I expected to be caught in rush hour traffic, but only slowed to a crawl once, when the road I was on split into two major roads. Once I was past the split, we were back up to the speed limit. At this point, I called Stacy to find out when she usually goes to bed. I started thinking I might drive all the way through.

I did end up driving all the way through, arriving at Stacy’s house at 10:15 pm. I had ideal driving conditions — a little rain in Georgia, but it wasn’t a deluge; the weather was beautiful for the rest of the trip; no slow downs in the construction zones, no accidents; no rush hour traffic. I couldn’t have asked for more!

Coming Attractions
Stacy and I have been doing some weaving on our rigid heddle looms. Tomorrow and Saturday, we will be at The Fiber Event. Monday, I’m driving to Kansas City, Missouri. I’ll be site seeing and visiting family for a couple days, then attending PLYAway, the first spinning conference put on by PLY Magazine. After PLYAway, I’m driving to Memphis to visit a friend, then driving home to Orlando. I plan to visit The Yarn Barn of Kansas, two Laura Ingalls Wilder sites (The Little House on the Prairie and the home Laura and Almanzo lived in for most of their lives), Graceland, and who knows what else.

I’ll be blogging as often as possible during the trip! I only brought my iPad with me, and I’ve discovered that the WordPress installation does some funky things when I’m using Safari on the iPad. As a result, the formatting of my posts might look a little different than usual. Hopefully, it isn’t too distracting!

2015 Goals and Plans

I do not set crafting resolutions. To me, the word “resolution” implies doing something drastically different than you had been doing before. I’ve been a fiber crafter for a long time and that is not going to change. Instead, I set goals and make plans. Goals differ from resolutions in that goals are smaller, concrete, and incremental. I already have a base of fiber crafting skills and I want to build on those skills. There’s many things I have never done, especially with crochet, spinning, weaving, and dyeing as these are the skills that I have only acquired in the last two years. Although I’ve been knitting for 20+ years, I spent many of those years knitting the kinds of projects where gauge is nearly irrelevant and so the list of things I have never done with knitting is longer than you might expect. I’m starting out the year by picking one or two skills to work on for each of the fiber crafts.

The Neverending Spinning

I finally finished the yarn I have been spinning that is made from one ply of pin-drafted undyed cream-colored wool from Ohio Valley Fibers and one ply of an undyed brown 50% Shetland / 50% Mohair blend from Psalm 23 Farm. I bought both fibers in April at The Fiber Event in Greencastle, Indiana and started the spinning for this yarn at the beginning of May. I finished plying on July 29, but got so much yardage that it took a while to wrap it on to my niddy noddy so I could set the twist. I just finished setting the twist yesterday.

WIP Wednesday: June 18, 2014

Since I was in Connecticut last week helping my sister unpack her new apartment, I did not post for WIP Wednesday. In the two weeks since my last post, I have made progress on several projects, started and finished a couple projects, and started a new WIP!