Twisp of Fate

I didn’t make any specific New Year’s resolutions, yet the past two weeks have seen us finishing things up, organizing, taking care of things long postponed, and the like.  Not much of this activity was picture-worthy, and so I tended not to post on the blog.  But we are here and busy!

I started teaching a knitting class last Tuesday based on Karen Alfke’s Top-Down Raglan “Unpattern” (with her permission).  I am leading 5 intrepid knitters through the process of designing their own sweater using a yarn of their choice.  Of course, I am knitting one along with them so I have to keep ahead!  I spent most of last Monday getting my class project started, going through some of my sweater design books and preparing handouts for the first class.  Things went well with the first meeting and I think it is going to be a fun and exciting process for everyone.

I also took most of a day last week to catalog a big box of books that were donated to our guild library last fall.  They have been sitting there on the floor of our home office giving me a baleful look for some time now.  It wasn’t a big deal, but I needed to enter them into an Excel sheet and classify them, print out labels and get them ready for shelving.  We are using the Pourrey Cross Textile Classification Schedule developed at Interweave Press to classify our books.  Sometimes it is a challenge to get the right match, but it is better than nothing (and certainly better than trying to develop our own subject classification method).  So on Thursday I took everything up to the meeting and my co-librarian and I shelved everything and generally tidied up the library.  We needed more shelf space so we had to move some things around and then shift all the books over to fill the newly freed-up shelf.

Next project up was going through and organizing most of last year’s Visa charge receipts and pairing them with their statements.  This is in preparation for entering into Quickbooks which I will start tomorrow.  In other words, starting to get our bookwork done so we can take everything to our accountant hopefully by early February.

Rick finished up some laundry room cabinets and installed them at the house up in Mazama a couple of days ago.  That means he is done with that cabinet job, which occupied him for much of 2009.  We are going to try to go up to the house sometime next week and get some pictures.  The owner has asked Rick to build 3 beds for the house and they are still working out the details on that, but that will be his next project in the shop.

He also took the time to build a new out-feed table for the table saw, and repaired the big sprinkler cart that we use to water out in the field during the summer (“finally got that **** thing out of my way in the shop”).

It did snow for several days last week, on and off.  I decided it was time for me to learn how to use the snowblower, so I cleared out the driveway instead of expecting Rick to do it.  That was actually a workout!   Discovered some under-used arm muscles.  We finally got enough snow to put a layer down out on the alfalfa field, and our neighbors pulled the tracking sled around behind a snowmobile to set a ski track.  We went around twice yesterday (40 minutes) and it was great skiing, although a hair thin in places.  We got a light dusting last night so that should improve things a bit.

And finally, I spun up some dusty green merino top to go with some previously spun singles.  These came from a spinning batt given to one of our guild members last summer in Spokane – she passed it on to me as she doesn’t spin.  It was a beautiful batt (94% superfine merino, 4% bamboo, 1% angelina, which gives it the sparkle) in color “Dolly Varden” created by Laurie Sitkiewicz from Anchorage, AK (ewenique@gci.net, no website).  But only 2.5 oz so I wanted to stretch it a bit to get enough yarn to knit with.

merino & trout before plying

I had divided the Trout onto 3 storage bobbins, originally meaning to make a single skein of 3-ply from it, but wound up plying each one of those with 2 strands of the dusty green merino, resulting in 3 nice skeins of yarn.  The sparkle from the Angelina is definitely there, but not overwhelming.