Tuesday, March 13, 2007

BusyBusyBusy

I have been working overtime trying to get a few things ready for the faculty show. The deadline has been extended one day and everything was due first thing this morning. I'd show you some pictures, but they are at home. I am at work right now waiting for some slides to scan so that I can digitize and label them. There are a lot of slides to get through and each one takes about two minutes to scan. So I have a bit of down time occasionally when there is not too much information on the slide to record.

Enter....The Socks. I'm working on an i-mac with a built in camera.
I used to sit and twiddle my thumbs occasionally for about 30 seconds between slides and it became old pretty quickly. So I decided to bring my knitting in and this is the progress that I have made in 30 second intervals between more than 300 slides. For the first time, I am knitting both sock at the same time to avoid the dreaded Second Sock Syndrome. You can see the humble beginnings of sock #2 hanging off of the needles of it's larger sister. So far so good. I have about a gazillion more slides to get through so I may finish the pair before the end of the year, which here occurs sometime in May. I doubt that I will get all of the slides done though.

But getting back to the reason that I have been absent from here for so long.... I have a felted wall piece, a dyed silk shawl, and a hand spun scarf. I had originally wanted to make a series of scarves with the hand spun but the second one I had a few tension issues. I decided to pair my hand spun with some mohair/silk blend that I dyed to match, and the mohair has no stretch to it what so ever where as the hand spun could be stretched about twice it's length. Some yarns just stretch more than others (as all of you knitters and weavers know) But when they are on a loom together, all of the yarns have to be under tension. I tried to compensate when I wound on and tied on, but apparently not enough. The finished scarf looks sort of a little like seersucker. Not what I was going for. So, to make a long story short, I have to do a bit more experimentation. I didn't feel that that scarf was something that I could show as my "best work", beautiful though it was.
I have also have a cold that has been keeping me awake at nights even though I am dog tired when I go to bed. Maybe I should just get up and blog!

Thanks for stopping by and I promise that I won't wait so long to wright again.

3 comments:

margene said...

The sock looks grand...take care of yourself and feel better quickly!

craftydabbler said...

Sorry for the frustration with the scarf. It sounds like you have been quite productive though. The socks look like they will be so comfy!

Valerie said...

Jackie,
I would much rather read an occassional well thought out blog post than a little drivel every day. You do great work and I love reading about it when you have time to post. No need to feel guilty about a blog! However, I can't wait to see photo's of the items you've described.