Yarn Quiz

You are 100% wool hand-dyed MERINO.
You like all things natural and would prefer to do
it yourself. You are socially conscious and
aware of your surroundings. You are kind to all
living things.


What kind of yarn are you really??
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200th Post!

I am setting up my etsy shop, which may someday be used solely to direct people to items that I may list in Jen's shop, but for now is my one and only internet selling presence (with no items to sell). To make it complete, I am looking to hire/barter/trade with someone to design a logo and then produce the graphics for a banner and an avatar.

The avatar needs to be 75 x 75 pixels in size.

The banner needs to be 536 pixels wide x 77 pixels tall.

Did I ever mention before that I have no graphic design skills?

Last night, I started to spin up the cream alpaca that I bought at the Windy City Spinning Guild in November. It was prepared as true roving, with all the fibers parallel for a worsted spinning technique. This stuff has the longest staple length, it must be 7+ inches, and its incredibly, unbelievably smooth and soft. I tried to spin up a medium-fine single to ply. The bag of roving is really heavy for its size, like a good cantalope.

Does mail really not get delivered on Veteran's Day? I was hoping for my locker hooking kit to arrive from Marr Haven today, and it didn't. If I'm lucky, tomorrow will be the day.

Yay Post Number 200! I will try to update more regularly now, so that it doesn't take another year to reach #300.

Last Call

I'm putting in my fiber order in the morning. I would love to have reason to buy some more of the multi-color merino, the best photos of which are at the Texas Fiber site that I linked to above. Leave a comment if you are interested. Tonight I was spinning and I went faster than the ounce/hour estimations that I made before. After spinning merino for so many nights, the Corriedale that I tried out tonight was very short stapled. The alpaca though... man-o-man was that stuff silky and smooth, like butter. And such long, long, long fibers. Incredible stuff.

Well, its getting cold in here, time for sleeping.

A firm offer

Ok, oh few readers, I have a proposition for you. I want to set up Bee-Ewe-Tee-Full Creations as an etsy shop to sell off the yarn addiction as I spin it up. I'm thinking of running all transactions through there, though they also take a percentage. =( But if I ever get business-serious about this, it will give me a web presence. However, I am not a designer. At all. And my graphic design application skills are rudimentary at best.

If someone speaks up by Friday morning, I will spin up a pound of any Ashland Bay wool into yarn in exchange for logo/shop design work. If you think that your skills, talent and time are worth more than that, I am open to negotiation. Send me the same information I asked for here.

Are you a pretty-picture-designer who knits and has a friend who is a kick-ass web designer who crochets? I'm open to teams as well. A pound per person seems fair, but payout will take longer, since it will be more to spin. I seem to be averaging an ounce an hour of singles and then another hour for plying. It definitely goes faster if I sit down to do it for a longer while, and if Anne is on the TiVo duty. So 2 pounds per month seems like it might be a reasonable pace to get the commissions/trades completed. The well-prepared roving spins like a dream on the wheel.

Let me know in the comments or email or AIM if you want to play, otherwise I'm buying my $200 of wholesale fiber as whatever I want, with no consideration for what someone else might want.

To David: I have not gone off the deep end, but I am addicted.

yarn!

I just got my first handspun yarn comission! Thanks Andrea, and Andrea's mom for being a knitter who of course always needs yarn. I will be spinning up a pound of merino in the multi-color of English Garden. It should be very pretty. Now all I need to do is figure out the rest of my fiber order by Friday. Anyone else need a very special gift for the very special knitter/crocheter/weaver/yarn-petter in their life?

Jen has posted about her cool finds from the Trunk Show on Saturday. My yarn is the third picture down. I love making yarn, I can't believe that I didn't know how to do this just six weeks ago.

New Craft Alert: To deal with the very soft, but filled with little bits of vegetable matter, wool (Finn-Merino cross) that came with my wheel, I am thinking about learning to do locker hooking and making a rug. The trouble is, that then I will be adding yet another craft to my to-do list. Does anyone remember way back when I wanted to try cross-stitch? Yeah, I haven't touched that shit in ages. All of my crafts are pretty much focused on fiber arts. I like them the best because they tend to involve the least amount of water. I really dislike having wet and/or sticky hands. Painting, dyeing, wet felting, most paper crafts and a lot of glass-type stuff all involve water-based clean-up and/or glue at the very least. ick.

I went to see Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit tonight. It was very amusing, totally worth the $5 ticket that included a free small popcorn and parking at the theater. Discount Tuesday at AMC City North is a great deal, I should go more often. Has anyone seen Chicken Little? The previews make it look very funny and well-done, but I'm a little unsure about a Disney movie.

It is way past my bedtime. Over and out.

Fiber Overload

Over in the land of LiveJournal, there is a community called Spinning Fiber. It is full of very nice people. One of them is making an initial order to a fiber wholesaler (click the title link) that makes freaking amazing fibers. I'm quite certain that they are the source of some of the best stuff I have used (not like the yucky vegetable matter (vm) filled stuff I have in the bag o' sheep) that was purchased from stores. The only trouble now is deciding if I have $200 to spend on fiber. Its quite an investment in a stash, but I'm also spinning the stuff up pretty fast. The trouble is that in a range of $9-20/pound, on average, of the wools that I would purchase, that is 10-20 pounds of wool to ship to Chicago and also to find a place to store and to spin up.

I think that if I didn't already have the bag-o-sheep, I would be more easily swayed towards all this new wool. Maybe I should just save my money and buy a set of wool combs, then I could prep the bag of Finn-Merino cross wool and spin it. Or I could use that stuff to play around with woolen spinning and buy $200 of fiber and just try my darndest to find a place to put it all in the crammed-with-crafting-supplies apartment. If I got rid of the yarn that I have, there might be room, but I have plans for that yarn. Gah! I am addicted.

Maybe I could use this as an opportunity for extended experiments with different types of wool. There are lots of different types, Merino, Colonial, English, Blue-Faced Leicester, Jacob, Shetland, Corriedale, Wensleydale, and then all the different colors and blends and regular versus superwash. Don't forget about alpaca and angora and all the different kinds of silk. I'm in heaven, but my bank account is groaning loudly at the idea of all this excess.

We definitely need a yahoo-group for the Windy City Spinning Guild, so that I could ask the other spinners if they would be interested without waiting until December's meeting. I'm sure that some of the people there would be game for wool purchasing, co-op style.

This entry is rambling, but I'm just not sure what to do. If anyone reading this is interested in buying even just a few pounds of wool, let me know in the comments. Or, if you want to buy the wool and have me spin it in to yarn for you, that could be arranged as well.

To bed with me.

Katy needs

Top 10 results from putting in my name with the word "needs" after it. Most recently seen at Jennifer's blog, Piddleloop.

1. Katy needs to get home, and get home soon
2. Katy needs will be taken care of
3. Katy needs every ounce of her courage
4. Katy needs fish money
5. Katy needs dental assistant with dental experience
6. Katy needs to know
7. Katy needs to know that her outlook could negatively affect the...
8. Katy needs checkups less frequently
9. Katy needs to be part of the overall planning
10. Katy needs to eat some sweets

This was strangely repetitive (I counted the top 10 unique answers to the search) and seems to be adversely affected by the existence of the town Katy, TX. Thinking of Texas though, got me thinking of Ms. Valerie Light (whose complete name I have put in with the hope that someday she will Google her own name, find this blog and write to me with her current contact information!) and how much I miss her now that she is far, far away in the Republic of Texas.

Good thing that I like yellow and blue

You Should Learn Swedish

Fantastisk! You're laid back about learning a language - and about life in general.Peaceful, beautiful Sweden is ideal for you... And you won't even have to speak perfect Swedish to get around!

href="What Language Should You Learn?

My 1920s name

Your 1920's Name is:

Eddie Jack

What's" Your 1920's Name?

PDF Tear Sheets!

After looking and looking, I found a sheet with PDF tear sheets for architectural and theatrical lighting instruments. Score!

I just need to show a designer that he doesn't want a Par 56, and instead he wants a little MR16 Birdie light... Times Square Lighting (and Gary Heitz telling me to look there) to the rescue.

In the end, I might even buy them there, but to start with, I have to sell the idea.

Yummy!

This stuff looks so yummy! And it is hand-dyed, and less than $2 per ounce, which is less expensive than the Lorna's Laces roving. I've heard that pencil roving is a bit boring to spin though, since there isn't much drafting to be done.

Jackpot!

Creative Reuse Warehouse... has lots of donated stuff for $4 per grocery bag full. The intention is to sell it to school teachers, group leaders, artists and other community members. That is so awesome. There is a place like that in Minneapolis, but I had always just figured it was a liberal-crunchy-Minnesotan recycling thing.

Mostly this is being blogged about so that when I go, "hey, what's that place in town that you can get crafty stuff by the bagful?" it will be recorded somewhere searchable.

Back to the drafting board and my Avril/Madonna mix.

Jumping on the bandwagon

You are a Social Liberal (73% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (13% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Mulberry Creators File for Bankruptcy

Yay! I was never much of a fan of Mulberry, and it seems that the market economy has spoken.

Sorry not to have updated recently, I'll try to do that soon.

Ask-A-Scientist

You can thank Gapers Block for my recent interest in FermiLab's public programs.

This is the general information page for their Ask-A-Scientist program.

Fermilab World Year of Physics 2005 Symposium

The Fermilab out in Batavia has public events. On Saturday, October 8, is the World Year of Physics Symposium, but they also have a herd of buffalo, nature paths, tours and an art museum. The art museum currently has an origami exhibit. I need to get registered now!

Artists erect giant pink...

bunny on the mountain. It is supposed to last twenty years, and was knit by dozens of people with pink wool. I think that it would be totally worth seeing if I lived in Italy.

I'm a total geek

The humble screw has changed little in 2,000 years, until a stubborn engineer at Illinois Tool Works came up with a fascinating new twist.

I have always been a hardware dork, even asked Cory Cope enough questions about screws during crew at one point that he went and did some research to answer my questions so that I would go away. I love the McMaster-Carr catalog. I look forward to trips to Clark & Barlow. I have favorite hardware that I like to work into projects as frequently as possible.

Hi, my name is Katy and I'm a hardware dork.

Did I mention that this company that the genius works for is in Illinois? I got a link to the article from Gaper's Block, a site about Chicago, IL. I haven't been updating much recently. Ken will be out again at work tomorrow, so maybe I'll blog a bit then. I've been reading and crafting and seeing movies and learning to eat new things, so there is lots to write about.

Puppies!

Its better than a Tomagotchi, and its got puppies! I want one, but not really. I got it for free in some manner, I would totally dig it, but I'm not interested in purchasing it just for some virtual puppy love. But either way, thanks to Daily Candy Everywhere, I found out about this adorable product idea.

I will update this entry later with a link to pictures of Baxter and his puppy, who was the last of the litter to be sold, and the only one that my family and the daddy dog got to meet. They are just oh-so-cute.

Oh man, watching the I <3 Puppy Cam! on the website while I type this makes me want one even more. Darn marketers. Must get to work.

Crafters Help Hurricane Victims

Go shopping for handmade items, and all proceeds will benefit the American Red Cross's Hurricane Relief Fund. I will be donating *something* to the shop, probably under the website of the Crafty Ladies and my name. When I do, I will post it here too.

And the donation ticker:

Personal Katrina Update: Dr. Judith A. Kelsey, my aunt, is currently in Lafayette, Louisiana, in her home there, and is doing alright. The status of her house in Franklin, Louisiana, on the bayou, is still unknown. Franklin is 90 miles due west of New Orleans, and Lafayette is approximately 50 miles north of Franklin.