Happy Mothers Day

Happy Mothers Day to all of the Mothers out there. Especially the one we call Mamoo!


I had a pretty good day. I slept in. Had breakfast made for me. Was able to thread most of my next warp. Has a bath that was relatively uninterrupted (a miracle in itself!). And had a lovely supper.

Scandinavian Chicken Salad. I posted the recipe here.  It was one of the first things that Bill made for me and it had been a family favorite ever since.

Mira also made me a cake. It was a Lightening Cake. So called because of the speed with which it can be whipped up. She had her friend over and the two of them were reading the recipe together. As in one would read one bunch of instructions and the other would read the next. Surprisingly enough, this resulted in a few mix ups and the cake wasn't constructed as quickly as advertised.

She then had fun with icing.

This was her first venture into cake decorating and the plan was to try and experiment with as many tips as there were. Colour mixing was also explored.

I likened it to a coral reef gone amuck. The cake was tasty, but I have to admit that the icing was a little over the top.

Fibre Arts Retreat!

It seems that I have been rather neglegent in posting for the past month. I have been busy though.

One of the highlights of the month was the trip that my buddy S and I took to the Maritime Fibre Retreat in Nova Scotia. It was at Oak Island Resort and we had a blast!

On the trip down we made a couple of stops. The first was at London Wul (sic) outside of Moncton. Ohhhlala! Heidi's place is crammed with all sorts of goodies of the fibre variety. I picked up and carried around a bunch of yarns and fleece before coming back to reality and putting half of them back.

I love this wall of colour

 Our next stop was Amherst to see Deanne Fitzpatrick's Rug Hooking Studio. I am afraid that I dropped the ball and didn't get any photos, but it was worth seeing. Colour Colour Everywhere!


When we made it to the hotel were the retreat was taking place, we quickly signed in, dropped off our bags in the room, and got straight to spinning. I hardly stopped all weekend. While I have been busy doing things, one of the things that I have not been doing (along with blogging) has been spinning. It was great to sit and spin and sip tea and chat.

S and I set up across from each other and got right to work. You can see the top part of Victoria in the photo above.
The first thing that I had to do was to ply my yarn that had been on the bobbins for a while. This is a blend of 80% merino, 10% nylon, and 10% cashmere that I bought at the spinning retreat in the fall and dyed myself. One skein is 275 yards, the other is 146 yards.

And then I started to spin my hand dyed merino. And I spun and I spun and I spun. 241 yards and 175 yards. I even managed to ply them before the end of the weekend!

And that was a feat because there was so much going on! Spinning, of course, but also weaving on a rigid heddle loom, quilting, knitting, needle felting, tatting, and lots of hooking! There was even a woman who was doing rope work on a bottle! Did I get a picture? No. I was busy spinning.

I met Janet of High Fibre Diet. It was actually a bit of a funny moment. She was chatting away with one of her neighbours and said something about her and her mother teaching weaving, and I said "Wait a minute! Are you High Fibre Diet?" She looked at me and said "yes" and I replied "one thread two thread!" Did I get a picture? No. I was busy spinning.

At one point, there was a gathering of people looking at someone's feet. Susan's maybe? In any case, she does all of her heels like this. Pretty fancy! She described how she did it and it made sense, but did I mark it down? No. I was busy spinning.

But I didn't spend the entire time spinning. The kids wanted me to "pick up" something so I went for a wee walk on the beach. I found shells and beach glass and seaweed. Guess what souveners I picked up for the kids?

The trip was a really good time and even better, really reasonably priced. I almost feel guilty saying that the whole thing (not including gas and all the stops along the way) was only $169. And that included the room for two nights, the fee associated with the retreat, two buffet breakfasts and one really kick-ass supper. The resort had a pool, sauna, and hot tub, all of which I made good use. The view was spectacular and the staff was great. The only one downside was that Saturday night there was an awards dinner in a conference room really close to our room. There were drunken hockey players and karaoke. Need I say more. Thankfully they finished at 1 and were all gone by about 1:20. But still.

All in all, it was a great time and I am looking forward to doing it again next year!

I love weaving

I noticed this the other day when I was winding a skein to dye some weft. I thought that it expressed the way that I feel about yarns and fibres in general. Although it seems lately that I have been having a hard time getting things done. And an even harder time getting things documented. Couple that with kids that have pretty much taken over my computer and you have a serious lack of posting.
Spring is here though. About a month earlier than it normally is so I hope that means that I will soon be taking more pictures and feeling more like blogging.

Right now, my WIP are numreous. I have hand dyed merino/cashmere/nylon on the wheel. I am almost done spinning and can soon start plying. I just have to finish that last little bit of spinning. Hmmmm.

Also there are two pairs of socks on needles. One pair was the left over yarn form the pair that I knit for Liam and I thought that there might be enough to get most of a second pair, but alas, no. SO I just have to dig in my stash to find something  that will go with the mostly dark blue yarn that I dyed a couple of years ago. They will not be prefect, but they will be warm.

Not much yarn left on the left eh? Thank fully they are at the same place right now so I can make them look like an eccentric pair. That's my plan and I'm sticking to it.

The other pair of socks is with Lornas Laces yarn that I won in a draw a few years ago. I had started a couple of pairs of lace socks but lace needs too much attention for me to knit successfully. These are plain jane socks that will be pretty and that is good enough for me for now.

I also have a warp on the loom. More about that later but here is a sneak peek.

And lastly I have felt vessles in various stages of compleation or experimentation.

Add to that a couple of application forms that I need to fill out and TAXES (ick) and general family life and I'm finding that I have little time or energy left for blogging.
Here's hoping that the spring will change all of that.

Call for Help

My friend D of Hobbits, Home and Abroad is also a Phd student who is looking for information. It is a survey that is geared towards people who use a different computer at work and at home. I took the survey ( I am not generally a survey taker) and it was relatively painless and only about 20 minutes.
If this is you (different computer at work and home) and you have a few minutes to let D know about your computer use habbits, go ahead and helpout.


Here is the link to the survey.

Thanks.

lost and found

I don't even remember when I started these silly things. If I wanted to search through my archives, I am sure that I could find them because I remember proudly stating that I was going to knit a pair of mittens in a time that could be measured in months, if not weeks, instead of the usual years.

Famous last words.

Oh. So I looked in the archives and it was worse than I thought. Here is my original entry about these mittens. Go look at the date. I'll wait for you.

Did you see the photo of the mittens? Did you see the state that they were in? Did you do the math and figure out how long they have been languishing in their project bag?

Well, they are finished now. I must have traded the needles for a smaller set (presumably to hold the stitches) because if you look at the thumbs, they are two different sizes. So are the mittens, really. Not my finest effort, but they are finally FINISHED!

The other knitting projects on the archived page are no longer around.  The hat and socks are finished and are being worn. I'm wearing the hat and Liam is wearing the socks.

Alas, the shawl is no more. I made so many mistakes and I really didn't like the way that the colours were shifting and pooling. So I frogged it back and it is now a ball. I really like the pattern of the shawl so I think that I will someday knit the fool thing. I think that I have almost 3 years to reach my self-inflicted deadline. So at this point, my goal is achievable.

And what else is languishing on needles in various bags around the house? All that I can think of is two pairs of socks and a pair of mittens. I have at least four things that are in the queue to go on the loom, but that is a story for another day.

Close Ups

As requested, here are a few close ups of a couple of my pots.

In the first few classes I threw two basic forms. One was belly forms that looked sort of like a honey pot in the Winnie the Pooh stories. Back a hundred years ago when I was a student, it was one of the forms that I enjoyed throwing. I made a number of mugs like this but over time they left my life in various ways. Some walked away in the hands of friends. Some were abused and eventually died. And a couple succumbed to temperature shock.
Here is the last one that I have. It was one of the ones that succumbed to temperature shock. There is a hairline fracture on one side so it has been holding toothbrushes for the last 10 or so years. 

I had fun decorating around the handle. I seem to recall that we had a workshop with a fellow named John Glick who showed us some fun decoration techniques that he used. I really wish that I had taken more photos of some of my pottery from this time. Most of the pottery ended up in the hands of others, and none of it was documented. I was still in the delusional land of "I made it once, I can make it again". At the time I didn't understand how children change things.

Oh, the lessons we learn.

Now I know, just because you can do something doesn't mean that you will.

My forms this time around were not quite the same. And as I said, I had forgotten (or didn't take into account) the whole shrinkage thing.  The little blue pot is 3 inches where the brown mug above is a respectable 4.25 inches. I was also in a bit of a rush and didn't really want to take the time to make handles. These cups would have had to be espresso cups anyway.

The second type of form that I concentrated on were bowls thrown off the hump.

The basic idea of this type of throwing is that you put a big chunk of clay on the wheel and center only the top of it. You then throw your bowl and cut it off the hump. The top part of the clay is centered again and the next bowl is thrown. This continues until the clay is all used up.

Here is one of my hump bowls.

I started to scratch words into my hump bowls. This one says "Truth". The glaze is one that doesn't  show up the words at all. Chris, the teacher, said that he was very interested in using "safe" glazes. And by that he means glazes that don't run too much and muck up the kiln shelves. I understand this totally, having seen what runny glazes that were over-applied by inexperienced people can do to a kiln shelf.

This is the one glaze that actually shows the words. I really like it but it is not the glaze that I would like to have on all of my pots. I would like a celadon. Which is basically a clear glaze with a little colour that shows up words and/or throw marks really well.

This cup says "Oh Dear". The reason for this was that it was still a little bit wet when I was trimming and I gouged the foot a bit. So...."Oh Dear.....I goofed"

Finally!

Here are the first of my glazed pots.

We had 5 glazes to chose from so I did some glaze tests to see how they flowed and how the engraving on the pots looked. There were a few that I liked but I am persuing other options because none of them showed up any lettering.

 

Here are the two bowls that I glazed last week. They seemed so big when I took them off of the wheel but now that they are fired and glazed, they seem a lot smaller. I know that there is some shrinkage in the kilns, but it seems like a lot to me. All my post seemed to be really small. I guess that I will have to try and throw some larger ones so that they can shrink down to a normal size instead of these tiny little things that I ended up with.

In any case, I should have a few more things to show sometime next week.

Pot progression

Now now. Not that kind of pot!

This kind.....

These are a few of my trimmed pots. I was going for a stemless wine glass shape. I think that I succeeded in most cases. There were two that managed to dry out a bit to much to trim and they ended up in the waste bucket, but the other 20+ managed to survive. I still don't know what glazes we are going to have available. I hope that they are ones that shows the trimming lines that you can see on the two on the left.
Last week I spent the entire 3 hour class trimming. NOT my favorite part of the potting process, but I generally like the results. On reflection, the dislike of trimming probably comes from my lack of confidence. I feel that I might trim through the bottom of the pot, or that I will not trim enough off the bottom and leave it too thick and it may crack in the kiln.
Practice makes prefect and I seem to have very little time to practice.

presumed lost.....

Last week, one of my colegues called me into her office and said that she had something for me. I magine my surprise when she handed me my long lost postcard! You can see it in it's humble begining here
There were quite a few things that happened to other postcards that not everyone agreed with and some people "fixed" a few things on the cards that passed through their hands. You can see the progression of the postcards that passed though me by clicking on the link "post cards" at the bottom of the post. There is one card whose progression through me is missing and I have to admit that it was so uninspiring to me that I forgot to take a picture of it.
Here is a detail of the front of mine.

And here is another detail of some fine stitching and a bit of bead work.

The one thing that seemed out of place to me was the small green object that was dangling from a red thread. Any one care to guess what it is suppose to be?

I was baffled until I looked at the back and saw this......

And actually, I am still a bit baffled. On something so rich with golds, why the funny felt lettuce? Maybe the guy on the front is suppose to be the laughing buddah who makes the lion go around and find the lettuce. The red string symbolizing the money.
Even though the lettuce is strung to the front, I like it better hanging over the back where it makes more sense when paired with the story. The green just, in my humble opinion, doesn't work with the front.

In any case, I am happy to finally have my postcard back. There is one, at least that was lost somewhere along the way and has not been seen since. Maybe it's hanging out with the handmade soap that I tried to send my sister a number of years ago. With Canada Post, you never know!

It Is Time

The seed catelogue came in well before Christmas. So early in fact, that I thought that there must have been some sort of mistake. I guess that the seed people must have been lookig to cash in on some Christmas shoppers.
However, I was busy with all things Christmas (mostly of the making kind) and so it was set aside. And, I will admit, forgotten.
It resurfaced the other day and so Bill and I started to look through it. I chose the peas, he chose the tomatoes. We also ordered broad beans, green beans, peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, and dill.  Lettuce, beets and brussel sprouts round out the order. We have other seeds left over from last year and so will also have spinach, broccoli, onions, corriander, and basil. Mira might try her gourds again. Hopefully this year, we can keep them in check a little better. They really grew. A lot! Very quickly! And for a long distance. I was quite shocked to go back to the garden after a few weeks absence and find gourd vines having traveled more than 30 feet!
Over the last couple of weeks, we have been blessed with weather that was unseasonably warm. There were a few days when I was able to go about with my jacket unbuttoned and my hat and mitts in my pocket. Sunshine, no wind and temperatures just above freezing. Now we have been dropped back into the deep freeze with night time temperatures in the -18 to -24 C and the daytime highs being -15 C ish. Reality in my little corner of the world. The thought of green things growing in the warm summer sun is a little balm for my frosty toes and nose. Only 4 months till last frost!

New Loom

Well, actually it is an old loom. It is not even new to me seeing as I have owned it for at least 14 years. What is new about it is the fact that it is set up in my house and I am able to weave on it!

It's a Fanny LeClerc was the first loom that I bought. When I bought it, it was dismantled in a junk pile of a house and I had to go back three times before I had all of the pieces. The place was way out in the middle of nowhere and at least 30 minutes away. We were not amused.

But once I managed to get all the pieces, I set it up in the spare room and started back on my weaving adventures. Then my boys were born and my "studio" became their bedroom. This loom was dismantled and shuffeled to the shed and eventually out to the garage.
Where it stayed.
For years.
A few years after the boys were born, Susan gave me the little Dorset and I was weaving again. I only thought of Fanny occasionally when I wanted to do something like overshot which requires you to switch back and forth between plainweave and twill. The Dorset is a direct tie up and not, in my mind at least, the type of loom to be weaving anything that requires a lot of foot dancing.
This past summer we got rid of the couch and a space in the living room opened up. Then we had the washing machine incident and the old washing machine ended up in my living room for a little while. When we finally move THAT out, I looked at the space left behind and thought "Hmmmm, that Fanny is just about the same size!" And just like that, Fanny was back in my life. It is tucked between a chair and the plant stand which makes it an ideal location because I have great lighting and a place to set my cup of tea and some weaving tools.

Currently on the loom is a set of four scarves to submit to a show that my weaving group is having in March.  I tried to take a picture of the first scarf but the lighting, while great for weaving, is not that great for photographing silk. It just looked really wrong. So you will have to be content to know that the first scarf is orange (as you can see) and the others are all different colours.  And, yet again, you will have to wait to see the results.

Getting down and dirty

A couple of weeks ago, a new semester of school started, and along with it was a new session of evening classes. One of the classes is a throwing class. Throwing pots on a wheel that is. Not throwing things across the room. Although that may happen with pots from time to time. All accidentally of course.

As I mentioned this past summer, I had taken a year of pottery back in my student days. I really enjoyed playing in the mud, most days, and thought that it would be nice to do a little more. I also would like to make a few large bowls and the perfect mug. I looked for my prefect mug at all of the craft sales that I was at this past Christmas season and didn't find what I was looking for.

So now I have a goal.

Here is what I threw the first day of class. 9 muggy forms and 3 bowls of various sizes. Unfortunately, they ended up being a little to dry to put handles on by the time that class came around again so I h=now have a bunch of "vases" or "handle-less mugs".

 Here is one of the 4 bowls that I threw last night. The circular batt that it is sitting on is about 12 inches in diameter to give you a rough idea of the size of the bowl.

And here are the other three bowls that I did last night. They make me very happy!

Next week, I get to trim these babies and try and throw my perfect mug form. And for those of you who have never done any pottery, when you throw a pot on a wheel, you usually leave some extra clay on the bottom and when it has dried a bit, you put the pot back on the wheel upside down and use a special tool to "trim" away any excess clay. That is how potters put a little rim on the bottom of pots. We call then feet.

As for the two things that didn't work out, well, you all know what a lump of sloppy clay looks like right? But I saved my clay and spread it out of a plaster bat to dry a bit. Next week I will get a wedging lesson. I tend to kneed my clay, which is a bad thing. Wedging is sort of like kneeding except that you are both softening the clay and removing any air that is present. Kneeding is an action that introduces air into the mass that you are working with and air pockets in clay are bad in so many levels. When you are throwing, they make your clay uneven on the wheel. Think unbalanced spin cycle in the washing machine and then translate that to wet clay. Not good. It can also cause your pot to blowup when being fired because the air pocket heats up and has no place to go, pressure goes up and a piece of your pot comes off. Also not good.
So I need to learn how to stop kneeding my clay and start wedging it.

Everyday is a new adventure.

Silver Spoon

For Christmas, I got a gift card from mom for Chapters. I had to go to the mall on Thursday to return something and thought that I while I was there I would look to see if I could find something at Chapters that sounded appealing.
I looked at novels, craft books, the sales shelves and nothing really popped out at me.
And then I went to the cookbook section. There many books popped out but there was one that really grabbed my attention.
The Silver Spoon. I had heard a review of it on the CBC last year and it sounded pretty good. I believe that it had been compaired to the "joy of Cooking" except for Italian cooking. Bill had also been expressing an interest in doing some more ethnic cooking. So the Silver Spoon it was.
And it fits nicely on my cookbook shelf.

When faced with recipes from a different part of the world, you can expect to find some ingredients that you have never heard of before. But I really never expected to see Beef Cheeks as one of them. I never realized that they were a part of the cow that one ate.

 And by beef cheeks, they mean the cheeks on the front part of the cow, not the back end. Apparently they are quite tough and stringy, no surprise with all of the chewing that a cow does. But when cooked correctly they are wonderfully flavourful. I don't know that I will ever actually try this recipe, but if ever presented with beef cheeks, I will know where to look to learn how to cook it.

First official FO

Last year, my friend Amber came home from BC. She had moved out west a couple of years earlier and when her mother told her she was moving, Amber knew that it was time for a visit. Time also to sort through some of the things that she had stored at her mother's.

We had a pizza night and she brought along some of the things that she had decided that she didn't want to cart out west again and among the yarns was a skein of her slubby handspun in white and cotton candy pink. Or Barbie pink. Or Girly girl pink. It was such a shock to see such a colour among Amber's things. She is bright, vibrant colours. Bold, in your face. But pale pink?
It was so odd, and I knew that Nicole would LOVE it, that I grabbed it and intended to make a hat for her.

Well, time passes and other things get made and stuff gets piled on top of other things. And then suddenly it is Christmas time and you realize that people will be showing up at your house and maybe it is time to do a little cleaning. Excavating in some cases.

And I found Amber's Pink Yarn. And a hat was born. It was a really quick knit and I finished it on New Years Day. So it really was the first official Finished Object of 2010.

It is a simple hat. I took a guess and cast on 60 stitches and did the typical k2p1 around until, after trying it on the correct head many times, I decided that it was safe to decrease. Near the end of the skein, there was an unexplained colour change which made this cute little bulls eye. I had some yarn left and thought that it would be cute to give the hat a little..... thing? on the crown. She likes it so far but if she decides that her stem must go at some point before she out grows the hat, it will be simple enough to make it disappear.

Earthy new yarn

Yet more new yarn. This one 100% merino that I added some silk sliver to as I spun. The silk is mostly white. I dyed it in the same pot as the yarn, but silk sliver is really hard to dye through. The silk doesn't want to open up and let the water in and the fiber on the outside of the sliver is so thirsty for dye that it soaks up all the dye in the area quickly and it doesn't have time to penetrate. So the inside of sliver dyed in the way that I did for this experiment, can have a white core. There are ways to overcome this. The one that I use most often when dyeing silk sliver is to heat the pot up before adding the vinegar. The heat helps the dye to penetrate. You can also paint the sliver, let it sit for an hour, wrap it in celophane and steam it. The benefit to this method is that you can manipulate the silk and pull the fibers apart so that the dye can penetrate.

New Yarn

Over the Christmas holidays, I managed to get spinning again. It was wonderful! I hadn't really done any spinning since the Spinning retreat around Halloween. I started to spin this 80% merino, 20% silk that I dyed, thinking (haha) that I might have enough time to spin the skein and weave another handspun scarf for my sales table before Christmas.

It didn't happen. At least not before H1N1 hit in mid November. At that time, I just gave up doing anything extra. I was in bed for a week and tired for a month so what I had to sell was going to have to be what I had.

In any case, I finished the skein the other day. It is still not washed and set, but it is all plied and skeined off.

matching colours

Sarah helped me with the Christmas Choice Craft Sale because my co-organizer was home with a preemie baby and was not available. However, I am very glad to report that Connor is doing fine these days.
When I found out that my co-organizer (coincidentally also named Sarah) would not be able to be there, I called in.....my other friend Sarah. Why do I feel like I'm in the remake of the Bob Newhart show?
In any case, Sarah was more than happy to keep me company, and refill the cookies and keep an eye on the mulled cider and do a thousand other things that needed doing while I was in at the sale and trying to flog my wares.
As payment I offered Sarah anything she wanted, such was my gratitude. Money, fast cars, drugs (well. Maybe Tylenol and Sucrets would be as far as that offer would go)
In any case, she just asked that I dye a skein of yarn to match a skein of silk that she bought off of me last year. No worries! I said....until I realized that the skein that I had dyed before was silk and was dyed with acid dyes and the skein that she wanted dyed to match was a silk bamboo blend and needed to be dyed with fibre reactive dyes because acid dyes will not dye bamboo.
Lesson time.... in my world, there are two basic types of dye. Acid dyes dye protein fiber, which is basically anything that comes off of an animal. Or out of in the case of silk.
Fiber reactive dyes are dyes that will work on cellulose fibers or anything that is plant based. Or, again, silk.
SO my task was to match a colour created with acid dyes with fiber reactive dyes. This is like comparing apples to oranges. There are two different types of dyes with two different types of base colours. Next to impossible. For most people. Thankfully, I had a secret weapon on my side. Her name.....is Harriet. She has been the studio head of the Surface Design department for many years and this woman knows colour. As in KNOWS COLOUR. She was in one day before Christmas and I begged he for a moment of her time. I think she was ironing some burnout velvet at the time and so had a moment to spare.
The conversation went something like this.
Me: Hi Harriet, can I use your brain for a moment?
Harriet: Sure.
Me: I need to match this colour (points to one colour in the multi coloured skein) It was dyed with acid dyes, but the skein that I have to dye has bamboo in it so needs to be dyed with FR dyes.
Harriet:Hmmm. Try 70% Navy, 20% Teal, and 10% Black.
Me: Thank you thank you thank you (accompanied with much bowing and scraping)

And here are the results. Top skein is the silk dyed with acid dyes and the colour that I was trying to match is blue in the center. Bottom skein is the silk bamboo skein that I dyed and rinsed until the cows came home.

I know that monitors present colours differently and all, but I am pretty impressed with Harriet's assessment of the colour and her knowledge of the fibre reactive dyes that we use at the school. I hope that one day, I will have half as much knowledge of colour and how to reproduce it.

Happy New Year!

Doesn't that look lovely? And nasty? I'm sure that it is not the hardest puzzle going but thanks to mom and dad and Christine for doing most of it. Somehow, I wasn't particularly in a puzzle making mood this year.

One thing that we were in the mood for was food! We had a few people over for New Years Eve and Bill went all out with the food preparation! Starting in the upper left near the green CD case, mushrooms in puff pastry, chicken samosas both hot and not, coriander hot sauce, potatoes in garlic mayonnaise, sour dough olive bread, spinach and feta filo triangles, chicken tikka, black bean dip both hot and not, and corn chips for dipping. What is not seen is the flan that was going to be for desert. Seriously way too much food, but I didn't have to cook a single thing yesterday.
Sarah brought over a game that her brother bought her for Christmas called "Dirty Minds" if memory serves me correctly. It features rather risque clues to mundane things that you have to guess, IF you can get your mind out of the gutter. Some were easy, some rather hard. No pun intended. We laughed and laughed and Bill has said many times that he really like the game.

I have found that lately it has been getting increasingly hard to write blog posts. The lead up to the Christmas season was particularly brutal this year and I took a while to recover. I didn't feel like doing much of anything beyond the usual things that need to be done at home as well as what needed to be done at work. That left me with little to post about and no energy to try and be entertaining. Typical post from December would have probably gone something like.....

Work today, cleaned dye kitchen, again, fixed the Clement, vacuumed under looms, put new warp on for media class. Couldn't think about supper so left it up to Bill, again. Did laundry. Homework with kids. Fun fun. Read for a while, went to bed.

Not riveting reading.

But I have had a break from many of the usual routines and I am feeling a little refreshed. I hope that this will lead into a new surge of creativity. I started a new felt vessel last night so I think that the year has started off on the right foot. I also plied the yarn that I spun at the spinning retreat two months ago. I have had both Bill and Mira asking to be taught how to spin and so my excuse is that I needed to clear my bobbins. The real reason is that I needed to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing some of the UFO's that are sitting around. But more on that later.
Happy New Year everyone!