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Archive for 2010

Early Spring

Posted in Methow Valley, spinning on February 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

It’s been kind of gray and misty around here lately, the snow is melting, the roads are clear, ground is beginning to show – in other words, it is more like March in the Methow, than early February!  Thank you, El Nino… while east coast and midwest seem to be reeling under heavy snows, we are just soggy.

Today we have some sun, though, so I went up the road and caught this picture on the way back down.  As you can see, there is still some snow on the ground up here on Benson Creek.

My friend Diana has a spinning day on the second Monday of each month (including a delicious potluck lunch).  That was yesterday.  There were only four of us but we had a fine time.  Diana had finished spinning the fleece from a Jacob lamb and had 3 skeins of yarn to show for it – hard to believe these all came from the same sheep!  She did a great job of separating out the colors before carding for spinning.  She also had some socks she knit years ago from handspun Jacob wool, so I got a picture.  Aren’t they great?  One pair also had handspun angora from one of her bunnies.

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4 Days on the Coast

Posted in home life on February 2, 2010| Leave a Comment »

We’re back from a busy weekend in Seattle, the purpose of which was to begin moving out of the apartment we have been renting there for the last 3 years, and also to visit with family and friends.

Friday was pretty much taken with the drive over (Rick with the pickup truck and cargo trailer, me following in the Honda).  We had time to go by U-Haul and get some moving supplies, get gas and wash the car, then we went out to his mom’s retirement home with his sister, for dinner and a nice long visit.

Saturday we started packing in earnest.  A lot of our nicer belongings have been archived there since we sold the house in Seattle, as we have no room for them here.  We packed up a lot of dishes, stemware, books, etc – then in the afternoon our friend Austin came over and helped Rick get some of the bigger and heavier pieces of furniture down into the truck and trailer.  We hadn’t seen Austin in a while and it was great to catch up with him, too.  That evening we met some friends for dinner at Serafina and celebrated a birthday.  I’ll add a picture later if I can get it from my friend (we used her camera).

Sunday was a day off from packing and moving.  I went down to Gig Harbor with some of my friends for a knitting day – an annual event referred to as “Soup Bowl Sunday.”  Our hostess used to have it on Super Bowl Sunday but now she just sticks to the last Sunday in January.  I was lazy and took no pictures – sorry!  Rick stayed at the apartment and worked on some drawings and estimates for 2 jobs he is bidding, and also had a visit with a friend who stopped by.  That evening we went over to another couple’s house for dinner, we actually met them here in the Methow, but now they have moved back to Seattle for family reasons.

Monday morning we finished packing boxes into the vehicles, ran around doing some Seattle-ish errands, and headed out of town a little after noon.  The drive back was easy, the passes clear, and we arrived home just as it was truly getting dark, with a light snow coming down.

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Spinning Day

Posted in knitting, spinning on January 29, 2010| 3 Comments »

We had a good turnout yesterday at Methow Valley Spinners and Weavers, for our 4th Thursday “focus on spinning” day.  Somehow we had kind of fallen out of the habit of making this 4th meeting of the month truly about spinning, so it was heartening to see all the wheels in motion and a lively discussion of fiber preparations and spinning methods.  There had also been some interest in learning more about crochet finishes so we had a little demo and practice of basic crochet and also Reverse Single Crochet or Crab Stitch.

I am teaching 2 knitting classes now.  The Tuesday night group is learning how to design and knit their own top-down raglan sweater.  Next week is the 4th meeting and everyone seems to be doing well.  I’ll try to get some progress pictures of their sweater next week.  Here is the one I am knitting along with them:

The yarn is some Rowan Magpie Tweed I bought several years ago from a friend who was de-stashing.  It’s nice to see it finally turning into something!  I am quite pleased with the cable pattern down the front and back, and the cabled rib with rolled edge on the sleeve.  I plan to use that around the bottom of the sweater as well, and then work out something along the same lines for the neckline finish.

My other group is on Thursday mornings – they just wanted some help with their projects, and to learn some new skills.  Yesterday I taught them how to do several different kinds of buttonholes.

We’re off to the coast today to start packing up and moving out of our apartment there.  We’ll be moved out by the end of February.  It’s been a wonderful place to come to when we are in the big city, right at the Ballard Locks, but it has become harder to justify the expense given how seldom we are actually there.  Kind of hard to give it up, though…

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A good Friday

Posted in home life, outdoors on January 23, 2010| 1 Comment »

Not too much to report here, but yesterday was a nice well-rounded day.  Rick went up to town to have a coffee date with some of his friends at the Cinnamon Twisp bakery in the morning, and I made good progress on the bookwork while he was gone.  After he returned and we had some lunch, we suited up and headed up to Loup Loup South Summit for some XC skiing.  They had just groomed that morning and it was relatively clear and cold-ish so the trails were in pretty good shape.  We were out for 2 hours and it felt great!

Not too much to take pictures of (just trees and snow, what can I say?) except on the way back we did come to a nice viewpoint to the west and the mountains:

Today we’re driving to Wenatchee so Rick can pick up a bearing he needs to fix his planer, which has been out of commission for 2 weeks.  He ordered parts from a place in the Midwest, but they sent the wrong bearing and now it is taking forever to get it re-sent.  Found out he could get one in Wenatchee, and we need to make a trip to Costco anyway, so off we go.

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Wet but still White

Posted in knitting, outdoors, spinning on January 20, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Greetings from the soggy Methow Valley.   We have had a steady supply of precipitation – if only it would stay about 5 degrees colder… then it would stay as snow.  At least we got a nice 3-4″ over Saturday night, and some of it is still on the ground, but the roads are once again completely clear.  Last week we twice went on a 2-1/2 mile round trip walk up our road, to the end of pavement, which most winters is a treacherously icy affair, best not attempted.

I hear most of the groomed ski trails in the valley are still in decent shape, though.  There was a big national level Nordic ski race here last weekend, the SuperTour, and they had to change the venue in part from the track near Liberty Bell High School to the north summit of Loup Loup (which has a groomed ski trail system of its own).  By all accounts the conditions were good and it went off well.

Not at the championship level ourselves, we were content to ski some of the trails up at Loup Loup South Summit last Sunday.  It was a little slow but not sticky and we were out for at least 2 hours.  Towards the end we had a light snow mixed with rain, so we got pretty wet, but it was great to be out there and doing it!

Yesterday I went with my Tuesday group for a snowshoe outing.  We drove up the Twisp River Road and tried the Buttermilk Sno-Park (not tracked and too icy), another spot at the end of plowing up the south side of the Twisp River (neighbors known to be unfriendly to parking there, were home, and some of our group were nervous…), and finally the end of plowing up the main Twisp River Road.  There we had luck and saw only that some skiers had been in before us.  We had to “break trail” but the surface was firm so it wasn’t too much work.

This was the turn-around spot for some, the beaver ponds and a rather grey outlook:

Twisp River beaver ponds

Four of us continued on to War Creek Campground for a lunch break and turn-around spot.  We figured we did 5 miles round trip, and I was a little tired!  But had a lovely hot soak in the tub on returning home.

On the fiber arts front, I finished my third Jared Flood hat from his “Made in Brooklyn” booklet.  I used my handspun grey Corriedale plus a strand of grey Rowan Kidsilk Haze.  It is wonderfully soft and springy!

I also finished up spinning some dyed wool roving that I bought from Heidi Parra at The Artful Ewe in Port Gamble about 2 years ago.  The roving was dyed mainly green with some areas of brown-into-black, so the color varies subtly along the length of the spun singles.  I wanted to ply it with something else so I could get more yardage, so rummaged around in the spinning fiber boxes and came up some baby camel/merino (50/50 blend).  So here is the final yarn, it is a 2-ply and about fingering weight.  I have 220 gm total or about 1/2 lb of yarn, approx 850 yds and I think it will be knit into a lace shawl.

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Resolutions

Posted in home life, spinning on January 9, 2010| 1 Comment »

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.

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