Simple solutions

Ive been having a problem with my plying...not the plying itself but the yarn being fed to the wheel, my little upright lazy kate tended to spin a little too freely allowing my yarn to gather around the spoke and causing the yarn to snag and snarl, then a comment by someone recently talking about lazy kates made me stop and think........

By turning the lazy kate on its side I stopped the freewheeling bobbins....such a simple solution and works brilliantly!

Hello again!
Im back after an extremely looooong abscence in which much has happened. Now where to start is the tricky bit but we'll start with the Internet which is now adsl, after about 3 months of the internet being slow, dropping out and tying up the phone we had had enough and decided to get adsl cable internet and I haven't looked back.

Next on the list is my car. Yay! after months of sitting in the yard and looking like a dumped vehicle it has been mechanically checked, had all its bits that needed renewing renewed and has even done a long drive away to Bendigo to check out the local Sheep and Wool show(more about this later)

Now for some rather *cough* big news in my time away from the blog I got married! Yep I know my blog says Im already married but that wasn't "official" and so my partner Andy and I formalized this by getting a celebrant and a very small gathering of people to officially witness the occasion nothing big as Andy and I are not the "big event" type of people. It was a lovely day and both Andy and I are extremely happy how it all turned out.

Now Im not sure if I mentioned this but if you remember way way back when I first started posting I had got myself a wheel given to me by Mr 50 Acres which I swapped for a little Sheridan Wheel (Sherry as she is known) Sherry and I have had a happy partnership and have gotten to know each other very well. Now Sherry's former owner contacted me a couple of months ago she unfortunately had a bad hip and was unable to spin anymore and was wondering if I wanted the wheel back, I said yes and got the country spinner back.

I didn't really have a use for the country spinner and I mentioned this wheel to Mandie of Ewe give Me the Knits she offered to swap the country spinner with a ashford double drive which I jumped at the chance of (I had the ashie in mind for another freind of mine Neekie but unfortunately she didn't have the space) but anyways in due course the Ashford has arrived and has taken up residence in my Craft Room. Her name is Brandy and she is a wonderful quiet spinner and Im proud to be her new owner.

The last new member of the household is my carder. Calvin Bruce Carder the First, with spinning rapidly taking over as my preferred choice Calvin has become one of my beloved making some beautiful batts and giving order to my fibres which seem to have been hoarded and crammed into every avail spot I can find..... No pix today as Im being lazy and I've got some carding I want to be doing (housework? Whats that?)Back later............

Random Act of Kindness

I have been the lucky recipient of a random act of kindness (RAK) this is a lovely gift I received last week from a member of a group I joined on Ravelry last week. Isn't it gorgeous? Pictured is two lovely skeins of lace weight yarn and some of my favorite munchies roll ups and some yummy chocolate, there was more but unfortunately I couldn't resist and the chocolate was eaten very quickly as I prepared the gifts for their photo shoot. The idea of the group was to gift items that people wanted and send anonymously (or not) and to give the recipients a lovely surprise in the mail -something totally different from the usual bills that usually come in the mail, and I was happy to open my mail last week and find these gifts. So to my lovely Rak'r I'd like to say thanks for my gift, I will use the yarn to make a shawl/stole and every time I wear it will think of the wonderful person whose heart is so generous that she is able to share such lovely yarn with me.

In other news, hubcap has finally decided to sell his car, although this car is old, it has duel fuel and its quite obvious from the amount of enquires about it that this is one of its main selling points with the price of gas nowdays people are looking for an alternative way of cutting fuel costs. Hubcap is sad to see the girl go (I for one am not, for the last 6 months this car has quite a bit of money for parts and such forth) and I am looking forward to my own car getting back on the road - after almost a year being housebound it will be lovely to be able to get out and about and not rely on hubcap to do jobs that I normally do. I do understand what hubs is going through the car has been very reliable over the years but the time has come, and it will nice to finally have a car on the road that we can both use.

Dial-up is a PITA

I have been ignoring my blog, not because I haven't had anything to write but because I am on dial-up and dial up is an extreme PITA. I can be online and suddenly dial up will cut out, as a result my phone bill has been rocketing up in charges, which delays my return to ADSL grrr.

Still I have managed to keep busy, my father who lives in an area where sheep farming is prominent, managed to get hold of some yummy 22 micron fleece for me and it sits in my laundry awaiting a time when I can clean it and prepare it for spinning. This fleece unlike the fleece I received several weeks ago, is fairly clean, with no sheep dags attached and Im looking forward to spinning it, I have made a rule to myself to not touch this fleece though until I have finished processing Cyril (sheeps name) Cyril obviously enjoyed rolling in his own poo going by the condition of his fleece and some of it has rather licorice looking bits attached and is NOT enjoyable at all to clean. Cyril though is giving me the opportunity of practising my spinning without the fear of totally stuffing it up and I hope by the time I have finished spinning the fibre I will be able to spin laceweight then I will be able to spin some of the fibre I have also got from EGMTK (photo above) I really like the way that EGMTK is so easy to spin, unlike my efforts at carding, where I tend to end up with lumps in my spun up fibre. I suppose my carding equipment leaves much to be desired, I have something similar to a carding brush but its a singular item and using that in conjunction with a very old and tattered dog brush is not doing much for the fibre. On the knitting front I have begun another circular shawl this time in a cream 4ply and am about half-way through, hopefully if I can stay away from ravelry and the OTF chat room I may finish it this month. I have also borrowed Victoria Lace Today from the library and am keen to try some of the beautiful stoles and wraps that are in the book - good reason to finish my shawl FAST- hehe

My first Circular Shawl

Its been a few days since I last blogged, the reason being the shawl that you see in the pic. I cast on for this on Feb 1 and it has taken me two weeks to finish this project. Its the first circular shawl I have ever done, what has put me off doing circular shawls is the number of stitches you use to cast on - six little stitches joined in a circle -impossible for my fingers but a wise freind Zephyrama gave me an alternative cast on using crochet which worked a treat after that it was plain sailing. The longest part of the shawl was working the border that took me a couple of days to do but it was worth the effort. I am happy with the way it turned out.

A little purse

Well the month has flown by rather fast, and I realise that I havent posted to my blog for two weeks so here I am giving you an update of what I have been doing. I have finally unpacked and am in the new residence, though I still don't know where I have put a lot of stuff its obviously going to take me a little while to get used to the new place. The biggest challenge at the moment is getting used to having neighbours again - all whom seem to have dogs(barking ones). I of course have two of my own, but they have been brought up NOT to bark at every little movement, whilst the dogs around us seem to bark at birds, leaves and even the dark. I am used to being able to get up and walk outside in my dressing gown here if I do that my neighbour is usually the very first person that I see and my dressing gown is not the most glamorous item in my wardrobe.
I did not knit for the first 17 days of the new year, I have been given a fleece and I have been busy cleaning it and carding it ready to spin. I am only a third of the way through washing and carding and so far I have three bins full of fleece waiting to be spun and I am not looking forward to cleaning the rest of the fleece its so labour intensive. The little purse in the pic is what I managed to finish in knitting, the pattern comes from the book A Gathering of Lace by Meg Swansen and there are some beautiful patterns in this book. I really want to do another pattern in the book The Hexagonal Purse, but this is knit in the round and starts with 6 itty bitty stitches on dpns which are joined and knit in the round, for the life of me I just cannot join those itty bitty stitches into the round, I drop the needles, twist the yarn or just plain drop stitches, Ive tried everything I could think of -nothing works so if anyone has any ideas Im all ears

Four seasons in one day

Victoria has always had the reputation of having four seasons in one day, and today it lived up to its reputation. First we had extremely hot weather 41 degrees in the morning, then at lunch time a cool change came through and with it a thunderstorm, not alarming in itself but when you live surrounded by natural bush a lightning strike can strike fear and start bushfires, as was the case today. Yes we had our first bushfire in our neighborhood, about 5 km away but enough to alarm our little community especially with the wild winds that had been gusting all day.
Luckily our rangers were onto the fire pretty pronto, and managed to put the fire out without loss of property or lives. On top of this we are also moving, only about 6km away and into a more suburban area but it is still a high fire danger area, (in fact there was a fire yesterday in the area but was quickly contained -got to love the CFA )
One of my neighbors Maria, rang and told me of the fire (she was at work and heard the reports from the rangers) and she had already rung her kids who were at home and told them to leave and rang me to tell me the same, I wasn't home but she left messages detailing the fire and told me it may be time to activate my fire plan - my fire plan consisted of leaving as quickly as I could but first I had to unhitch the goat so the goat could also escape if fire threatened, I would hate to have the poor animal die because it couldn't escape but luckily that never had to eventuate.

Moving is such a horrendous job and each time I move I vow never to move again, but circumstances often force me to move and each time I do it seems to get worse, I am again vowing to go through my possessions and remove the extra things that I keep and this time I am again making that vow - do I really need to keep all the extra curtains and blankets that I keep but never use? Already the new house has one room of boxes and I dread what I know is inevitable -unpacking the same damm boxes that I packed last week and the week before - I hate moving. (sigh)

Welcome to my nightmare

This morning, I opened the bedroom door to find a humungus huntsman waiting to come in. I quickly found a jar and placed it over him and slid a piece of paper under the jar so I didn't have to touch him. I WAS going to release him outside but then discovered the whole house had been invaded by a total of 5 of these monsters.

Then I noticed something strange in the jar where I had put two of the spiders, there were worms in the jar with the spiders loooong skinny worms.

Needless to say I am totally grossed out and I think the jar will be going straight into the bin, and I will be dosing the family (dogs included) with worm medicine, I don't know if these worms infect humans but I'm not taking the risk. I think I also will be investing in some boxes of spider spray a whole truck worth should be enough!

Um please explain?

Oh dear, the model ain't happy about it either I think!

Happy little vegemite

Well after days of fingernail biting and pacing the floor I am very happy to say I have got my yarn back. Today finally the police yards were open and we were able to pick up our car. First thing I looked for was my yarn and it was there still in a plastic bag that I had put it in. No damage was done to the car, in fact not much gas was used since the car was driven only 2 blocks from the shopping centre from which it was stolen, the police actually told us who they thought had stolen the car and asked us to go thru the car and see if anything was taken.

The only thing missing was a 17 year old cordless drill, and I believe the police were going to search the suspects home and this was the ammunition that would prove the suspects guilt.

I am just glad that we have back our car, and my yarn and just want to put the whole horrible experience behind us. Already 2008 seems a lot brighter I hope it continues that way for us.