have been greatly exaggerated. Or at least twisted a little bit. Because I’m definitely breathing; sometimes I’m even breathing quite heavily.

Okay, wait. This isn’t THAT kind of blog. I just mean that the last two weeks have been a giant flurry of activity. Between skeining, dyeing, reskeining, listing, and then shipping almost a hundred skeins of hand-dyed yarn on the etsy shop, setting up a new shopping cart system on the lime & violet site (not active yet), and deciding to try cooking just once a month, AND setting up a national sleepover weekend for knitting listeners — well, there’s been some knitting and spring cleaning, and yarn-fondling going on here, too. And a fair bit of buying things up, in case we do move at the beginning of June.

For example, this:

Which is one of those photos that gets me all tingly. STR. Seven pictured skeins. One in the club colors and six that had to come home with me. (I had a coupon.) A knitpicks options set, because my Denises were giving me fits, and life’s too short to have unenjoyable knitting. And those teeny little squares in the middle? The start of a babette blanket, because *clearly*, I don’t have enough to fill my copious stretches of free time.

You, in the back…stop laughing so loud. You’re waking the neighbors.

:)

We’ve had pretty rainy weather here the past few weeks. It’s April; I suppose that’s to be expected. The upside is that I love rainy days. The cocoony feeling of being in a sweatshirt and a blanket and curled in a chair, movie going in the background, doing something with your hands all day and not feeling guilty about it at all, because, hey — it’s raining. The downside is that taking pictures in natural light becomes an exercise in futility. (See above photo. That’s the fourth try, and it’s still pretty dark.)

That’s the long-winded way of saying, “Yeah, I’ve been gone for a while, and provided there’s sunlight now and again, I should be back regularly more soon.”

I’ve never been one to say things the short-way.

Not that you probably couldn’t have figured that part out by now all on your own. :)

eta:
p.s. That book in the picture? Half off the $1.99 price tag. And it has projects in it like this:

*swoon* 1970’s embroidered fashion. Mmm.

Oh, man, do I love Good Mail Days ™.

Not only did the postman deliver some yarn from a lady who was gifting some to Lime & Violet (for the book testknitters and us to use. Squee!), but the above package arrived for the Lime & Violet Official Fiberpr0n exchange. My secret sibling mailed me a giant box full of stuff — yarn and handknit items and fiber for spinning. Even some “Cherries in the Snow” lipstick, because we’d joked about the recent Inner Girliness that’s been escaping.

In short, she’s freakin’ amazing. I’m lucky she got my name. :)

I need to go play with things now.

We’ve had inordinately cold, rainy days around here for the past few days. It’s been alternately cold and drippy for so long that my poor camera’s being disused. (The flash on it is evil and likes to turn everything into high-contrast, low-color washed out messes.)

So instead, I’ve been dyeing things like a mad fiend. I’m over time on my studio Mission — that fiberwall is going very slowly. Not that I didn’t expect it to go slowly, but carding and dyeing take a *lot* more time than I thought they did. Granted, I’ve never done this much at once, so it might just be a relative thing.

Today, we had a few sunbreaks, and the minute the sun broke out from behind the low cloud ceiling, I dove on the camera to get a picture of some of the rovings and laceweight and other varied goodness I’ve been trying to put together. (The batts aren’t pictured, since this pile was already too big for my table.)

What’s really sad is that I kind of want to keep most of this. They’re coming out *so* beautifully — better than I’d hoped, even. Which, like I mentioned on the description at flickr, is kind of counter-productive to the whole “use things up and get them out of here” goal of this mission. :)

I’m still on a vintage button kick, too. I’ve taken to making knitting stitch markers with the smaller ones, and I’m thinking of doing a set with some of the larger ones and some felt. It’s a sickness, buttons. I can remember being very small and sitting on my grandmother’s floor with her tin of buttons, just sorting the prettiest ones out into a pile. Most of them went back into the tin and were carefully placed back into her closet.

Sometime, I should tell you about my grandmother. She was totally Martha Stewart before there was a Martha Stewart. Well-organized, crafty, resourceful — cook, gardener, seamstress, wife.

I hope someday I can grow up and be just like her.

Considering that I’m going to be 36 in a few months, I’d better hurry up and get on that.

I have this little weakness for jars of vintage buttons. I try to resist, but they call me with an intensity usually reserved for small furry cute things and yarn. (Though, really, what’s yarn other than a small furry cute thing? Sheesh. At least I’m predictable.)

A couple weeks back, we trekked to Topeka, KS, which took us down I-29 and across Missouri into Kansas. On the way, there was a huge truck stop thing that was a combination gas station, fireworks stand, and antiques store. I kid you not. You can’t make this stuff up.

Inside, I found an old tin-topped Mason jar just chock-full of little bits of vintagey goodness, and while I tried (not very hard) to resist, it came home with me anyway, despite the fact that I didn’t have anything I really wanted to do with them at the time.

Today, while thinking very hard about coloring Easter Eggs (we’re about a hundred miles from my family, or we’d be eating lots of ham in celebration instead…), I whipped out the jar of buttons, and had the idea that they’d make really nifty magnets all stacked up. And since I ALSO happen to have this really great magnetic primer that I plan to use one of these days soon, I figured now was as good a time as any to see if the concept worked.

And it does! I made about two dozen of these before my brain started to hurt from the adhesive (E-6000…it’s a wonder glue, but it’s stinky…), and after realizing that I don’t need two-freakin’-dozen magnets, I made some tags out of vintage book text and inks and paint, and found some washers to stick on the back to give the magnets something a surface on which to stick.

The result is above. I love them way too much for words. I’ll be popping these three sets (two in lime & violet colors, and one in a combination of staid and whimsical-ish colors called “pinstripes and petticoats”) up on the limenviolet etsy store sometime soon. I’m updating tomorrow with laceweight yarns and more batts, so I’ll probably list them then.

Moral of this story: When something (like, say…a jar of buttons that might be a little expensive for your budget but makes you swoon a little…) calls to you, say yes. But give it a purpose. I’m happier with the magnets than I ever was with just the buttons in a jar. And that’s saying something, because I loved them before this…but now, they have a reason to be.

When your studio table (which, incidentally, is about 4 feet wide by a curved 12 feet long…) appears to be entirely covered with something reminiscent of an exploded muppet — it’s safe to say that your carding is going according to plan. Ahem.

While there’s a *lot* of fiber still on the table, the fact that my fiberwall shelves are almost clear of anything not dyed by an indie dyer (and thus, purchased to be spun, not dyed to be carded into batts) and a few balls of undyed roving awaiting weighing….it’s a positive thing. I’m moving in the right direction. I’m making a dent in the giant mountain of sheephair that’s been insulating my studio for way, way too long. I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Today, though, I’ve been completely bereft of battmaking. I’ve been playing with the skeinwinder (A Fricke Easy-Wind electric adjustible, for those who might wonder), which *finally* got put together after an important bracket replacement arrived in the mail today. The bracket was bent in shipping, which was frustrating, but both Amy from Spunky Eclectic, where I bought the skeinwinder, and the people at Fricke were *so* on the ball with fixing it that I hardly noticed the frustration.

And today? I made *skeins* out of some laceweight hanks (alpaca! 100% alpaca!) that I’ve had here, dyed, for quite some time now awaiting the arrival of the winder:

I’ve three more to dye and skein, and then it’s up to etsy they go. Along with a new crop of batts and possibly some dyed rovings if I have time after all the carding. It’s not *hard* to card batts, but it *does* take some time.

Which really leads me to the reason I sat down to write a post to begin with. I just took the long way to get here, and gave you some scenery to look at along the way, though, right? Ahem.

A lot of what I’m doing right now falls under the heading of Big-Ass Projects. Pardon the language. But it’s true. I’ve got the fiberwall to deal with and all its related carding. I’ve got a bunch of roving to dye (probably thirty pounds, truth be told.) I’ve got to find a new supplier for sock yarn (which is big in itself, really). I’ve got two blankets on the hooks, an involved scarf and pair of Evilly Complex Socks on the needles. None of which could be categorized as “quick and dirty” on the project list.

It’s forcing me to slow down. And getting my brain to do that is sometimes like trying to herd gnats. It keeps veering off in a thousand directions and tells me I should be doing other things. But if I ignore it…if I stick to task and do the repetitive motions over and over and over…it starts to fall into line. My thinking slows down. My tension starts to fade a little bit. My heart rate follows my brain.

I’m more connected to what I’m doing, rather than trying to think of what’s next all the time. I imagine it’s what the slow food movement people talk about when they say they appreciate the process of living more fully by taking the time to prepare and cook for themselves, slowly and with mindfulness.

Now if I can just remember that feeling the next time I’m multi-tasking with four hundred thousand things on the to-do list and no possible way in the physical universe that I’m ever going to be able to get everything done in the span of a day…I’ll be set.

A little bit of fiber, a whole lotta zen, wrapped up in the simple threads that make up life and yarn.

I’ve been watching the Ripple-Along group at Flickr for some time now, waiting to get a copy of “200 Ripple Stitches” before starting. I had this lot of Naturespun Sport sitting around here in red and aqua and brown and pink, and used a random stripe generator to figure out how many stripes of each color would look good.

The book arrived Monday; I’m about four inches into it now. It’s so relaxing to sit there and count 1…2…3…decrease… over and over — meditative, really. Since my knitting projects have been relatively challenging lately, this is like a break for my brain while still getting to touch wool.

And some days, that’s exactly what the doctor ordered.

My copy of “The 1000 Journals Project” by Someguy, linked with the website of the same name and project, came from Amazon today, and…..*drumroll*….

I’m in it!

Kind of.

That entry, above, done in October 2001 at a little coffee shop in Riverside, California, is on the inside front cover, up at the very tippy-top left hand corner.

I about fainted. Seriously.