Step one: steal underpants.
Step two: ?????
Step three: PROFIT!

Welcome to my first pair of stolen underpants:

(Anything with a “step one” is “stolen underpants” around this house. We’re fond of the undperpants gnomes. This is because, most likely, we are deranged. We’re fine with that.)

More than being about some questionable profit, this is actually my completed Step One in the multi-step, zillion hour long project for this summer. I’m in the Spun Stitches knitalong/spinalong, where you spin the yarn for a shawl and then knit it up, and most of my free time has been about finding all the Blue Faced Liescester roving in my stash and deciding how to fill the holes.

Because, folks, I have lost my mind. I decided to spin the yarn for the fingering-weight giant shawl-o-rama, the Keepsake Shawl, put out by the Koigu people. I made one before, and while it didn’t really look so much like the picture when I was done (it was the first project I made beyond scarves…), I can say with relative certainty that my entire life revolved around that project for six weeks. Every spare moment was spent knitting, and I had a LOT more time to knit then.

So now, I’m pretty sure I’ve lost my mind. Not only knitting the shawl, but spinning the yarn for it?

I claim temporary insanity.

But it DOES mean that I’m going to blow through a lot of fiber stash. And get over my resistance to knitting with my own handspun, which I’ve done maybe once or twice in my entire spinning tenure. (It’s so pretty when it’s done and I never want to “ruin it” with my crappy knitting skillz. So I give it away or sell it. Every time.)

It’d better be a long summer. I’m going to need the time.

But step one’s done! (now to cast on 301 stitches….yipes.)

Please forgive the craptacular picture up there. We’ve had two days now with no sunlight, and it makes for spectactularly bad picture-taking.

Not that I’d have noticed much. Monday morning, our neighbor to the south decided that what he really had a desire to do was burn his field. The one he continually sprays with pesticides containing such wonderful goodness as anhydrous ammonia.

The resulting flattened and charred field also ended up landing me in the ER with a migraine-to-end-all-migraines, where they gave me Happyjuice Shots in my rump and told me not to drive while I was on the LorTab.

It was my first migraine of that type — where you lose vision in one eye and are awakened by the sound of your own whimpering — and scared the pants off me. Of course, the LorTab was nice, in a drugged-up, WOW THOSE ARE PRETTY COLORS kinds of ways. Apparently, I was trying to have an in-depth discussion about the color of the new Shrek shakes with the employees of McDonalds, in fact. One poor woman was looking at me with a kind of panic reserved for those times when a hardcore drug addict comes into your place of business and tries to engage you in conversation about FD&C #4, until my husband pointed out my hospital wristband and she relaxed a bit. (Understand, i probably looked like Crazeee Incarnate — matted hair, mascara rings under both eyes, babbling about the color of a shake. *facepalm*)

At any rate, I’ve been spinning, as the bad, blurry pic up there implies. I joined this -along called Spun Stitches, where you spin the yarn and then make a shawl from your own handspun.

Yes, I know I have about .4 minutes a day of free time. But I’ve always wanted to DO something with my handspun, and this was just the opportunity I needed. (And if all else fails, I blame the drugs, despite the fact that I joined pre-migraine.) I’ve always kind of looked at my handspun the way an artist looks at a finished product — it’s done. Not that I haven’t really loved some of it. But once I’m done spinning it, there’s a sense of completion, and since I didn’t have a project in mind while spinning, the Done thing was okay with me.

But I’ve been itching to actually keep some of it — especially with all the great fiber that’s been arriving in the mail lately. Yarn Pirate stuff, Pigeon Roof Studio’s fabulous rovings, and today, some Vesper roving that’s just too pretty for words. All of them have color themes that work together, because I’m nothing if not predictable (pink, purple, blues. Some brown and a lot of creamy natural color showing through. They all follow a formula. I should try to break out of that one day….).

So today, I had A Thought. I should avoid having these A Thought moments, because they almost always include things that I look back on later and think that they were good ideas at the time, but what have I gotten myself into now? That kind of thing. This A Thought moment was the same.

See — I want to knit something gorgeous with my own handspun. I’m in this knitalong. I was planning already to use one of the Yarn Pirate rovings (all four ounces of it) to make something lacy and stole-like. But the thought hit me that I really want to make another Keepsake Shawl, now that i’m a better knitter. (I made one, and, well, we just won’t go there about how well it’s knit. Or how NOT well it’s knit, to be more precise…) And I DO have quite a bit of Blue Faced Leisecter in my fiber stash, dyed by some folks with incredible eyes for color. And if I just spun six of those 4 ounce hanks into fingering-weight yarns, I could make a Keepsake.

With my own handspun.

Apparently, I have forgotten that it takes about a week to do a skein of fingering-weight two-ply. And that’s with some time in there to spin, rather than just gaze at the Lendrum all wistfully. And that I’d need to do that SIX TIMES, hoping that the plied finished product would look even remotely good together.

Still, I think that’s the track I’m going to take. I mean, if I’m going to kill myself to make a shawl, it might as well be a good one, right?

We’ll see how this goes. Six weeks of spinning fingering-weight might well bring on another round of shot-inducing migraines.

This time, I’ll stay away from McDonalds if they do.

So I mentioned that I got a new toy.

Not the OLD new toy (the drumcarder, which has now seen more use than a central park bench), but the NEW new toy: a Kromski rigid-heddle loom.

I’ve already warped it up once (badly), and did a foot-or-so long sampler of some cruddyish yarns that I had around here, and learned the lesson that one should never warp one’s loom with anything that may fuzz up and stick to itself. This, I found through trial-and-error, is a recipe for Frustrated New Weaver, and possibly a bit of stomping around with heavy boots, very close to the loom’s position on the floor.

So I’ve started warping it again, this time with some cotton-linen blend from The Dyeing Arts, since she dyes a whole lot of cotton and linen for inkle weavers at the rennaissance fairs she attends with her husband and kidlet. She assured me that this…? Much less crazymaking. Which sold it for me. (Plus, she gave me this as a sample. Much like a drug dealer, she hands me things and lets me “try” them first, which means I get hooked and keep selling organs for more. You should spin her painted fibers sometime…you’ll see what I mean. Mee-yow.)

And speaking of spun fibers:

This is what I’ve been doing the past few days, when not looking longingly at the loom and wondering if I’m ever going to get it when it comes to warping. Spinning. A lot.

On the bobbin there is some Vesper merino-tencel roving, in the colorway “Firestar”, spun thin and plied up like a good little spinner. (Rather than just leaving them in the box of “To Be Plied” fiberlicious singles that is where most of the singles go — I just forget them sometimes if I’m not careful.) The other stuff on the table there is the tail end of some Pigeon Roof Studio roving that I spun up as a single a long time ago now. Again with the black-hole box of singles to be plied.

It seems that when I’m the most busy and stressed out, that’s the best time for me to sit for a while and just spin. I end up letting the brain bubble and decompress a little in the spinning. It’s almost to the point that spinning’s a kind of therapy to keep me sane, moreso than the finished result of getting a great yarn out of the deal. (It’s a nice byproduct, though.)

With as crazy as life’s been the past few weeks — the store opening, Knitter’s Connection looming on the horizon, the book being seriously overdue — there are days when the feeling of thin little bits of roving twisting through my fingers is like a cheap comfort. And one that’s much better than cracking open the new bottle of tequila, which is my other option here at home.

Ahem.

Twenty seven years ago today, Mt. St. Helens decide that it was going to lose containment and spewed spires of ash and hot mud over a large area of southwest Washington.

On that same day, J emerged into the world. To hear his mom tell it, it was with just about as much fury.

Back when I was still just stalking my now-husband, this was one of the pictures he linked to from somewhere that I sekritly saved on my hard drive so I could get a quick peek at him throughout the long days back at home. (Which was about two hours away at the time.)

Maybe I shouldn’t be admitting I’m such a stalker, eh?

Happy birthday, J. The world’s a better place with you in it.

Last night, our local Spinners & Weavers Guild had a meeting and a sale. We do a garage sale every year on our last meeting of the year, and since we end our year in May (taking a break over the summer), the garage sale was last night.

Instead of being a lot of different people hawking stash last night, we were all digging through the stash left to us by one of our members who passed away early this year. Pat was such a nice lady and an incredible knitter. She’s missed, every day.

Sidestory — Pat’s husband would often come with her to Guild functions. For the annual fiber arts sale, he would bring in her boxes of items to be sold and help us check them all in (she was very prolific) and I used to watch them together while I was waiting for more check-ins. He would talk to her, their heads close together, his hand on her arm, and I would wish very hard that someday, my husband and I would be that close, even after many, many years of being together. It was clear they were very much in love. I hope he’s okay, too. It can’t be easy losing someone you’re that connected with.

We all descended on the garage sale last night with an equal mix of rabidity and mournfulness. I filled a bag full of amazing yarns and some fabric and a couple vintage embroidery hoops, because everything was fifty cents apiece.

Fifty. Cents.

To say I lost my mind just a little would be an understatement. That picture up there? That’s what would FIT ON THE TABLE. Scads of Monteza and Tapestry and a silk-wool BAG of skeins. Tons of Cascade 220 in a few different shades. Gorgeous stuff that goes for more than ten times the fifty cent mark, for sure.

I went to pay, and they hefted the bag…and charged me ten bucks for the whole lot of it. I told them that wasn’t enough, but they said ten bucks was fine.

Part of me couldn’t decide whether to pay quickly and run away before they realized their mistake (I got more than sixty skeins of stuff!), and the other part kind of wanted to faint from the headiness of new, good stash.

So today, while pawing through it, seeing what needed winding into balls and where to put it all, the mailman delivered this:

Two skeins of sock yarn (one, the Inky colorway, is a limited edition of TWO…*swoon*…) and four ounces of fiber from Yarn Pirate, who is a complete inspiration and amazing colorist. I kind of want to invite her out for coffee and be her best friend, just so I can stand next to her to see if some of her colorgoddessness will rub off on me whilst I bask in her glory. Seriously.

I have the Apple colorway earmarked for a pair of socks already, and the Inky is going to be my first attempt at socks for my husband. He doesn’t know that yet. I’m waiting to spring it on him, since he keeps telling me NOT to make him socks. Says he’s hard on socks. I tell him that he married a Knitter, and thus, he’d better get used to socky gifts.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

I’ve been dyeing since I woke up. (I got out of bed around 9:30, but didn’t actually *wake up* until about noon or so, so it hasn’t been that long.) And while I was waiting for the new batch of skeins to soak and bloom, I thought I’d work a little on what I’m hoping will be a gift for my mom for Mother’s Day.

It’s the Montego Bay scarf from the new Interweave Knits, designed by Amy Singer, and man, I’m telling y’all…I don’t know if it’s the yarn or the pattern or what, but this thing is so much fun to work on. The yarn’s fabulous (Handmaiden Sea Silk in the Rose Garden colorway that Janice sent me), and the pattern’s an easy fisherman’s lace pattern (four row repeat, two of them being “purl all stitches”), so I can throw in a DVD and just let my fingers take over. I’ve got about a foot of it done so far, and I’m hoping to have at least five feet by Saturday when my brother gets back from Texas. (He’s flying into Omaha, so I get to see him before he goes home, so I’ll give him this to take back to Mom.)

For as simple as it is, it’s really impressive-looking. And I may well be in love with the yarn. (Of course — it’s more expensive than what I’d usually pay for yarn, so it just figures that THAT’S to what I’d develop a new addiction. The knitting gods are conspiring to make me poor…and to crowd the rest of the house in smooshy yarns.) I love it so much, in fact, that I ended up buying another skein in the Renaissance colorway (blacks, dark rose, and shaded blue) over at The Loopy Ewe so I could make one of these for me. (I wear much more black than I do pink, so I’m thinking this’ll get a lot of wear this summer.) Amy Singer? You’re a genius. Can I have your babies? Can we raise them at the Handmaiden factory? Please?

Funny how that works with me, I noticed recently. (The simple thing, not the having babies with Amy thing.)

Sometimes, I go through phases where I really want complicated, challenging projects and things in my life. I need the stimulation, maybe. Or I just really love the finished object and become willing to put up with a lot of frustration and challenge to get to the end result. And other times (much more of the time lately), I find myself craving the simplicity of a fabulous yarn and an easy pattern. I need the balance, maybe, to act as a counterpoint for the craziness I tend to get myself into. (i.e. I know what would be fun, I say to my friend and business partner, let’s write a BOOK and have it done in FOUR MONTHS! YEAH! *twitch*)

Sometimes, I guess, the simple things — the feel of silk in your fingertips, the rhythmic motion of the needles, the Flow that happens after a few minutes of repetition — are the things that make life worth living…and help you appreciate it when you find those stolen moments of peace.

There’s my life for the past few weeks.

Yarn, and lots of it.

When I’m not dyeing, I’m skeining. And when I’m not working with yarn, it seems I’m wrtiting about working with yarn.

This is, quite possibly, the most perfect time of my life.