Even before I left, I decided to do a big purge of my art supplies and craft supplies, because I have a lot of stuff I don't use and it gets in the way of me using the stuff I want to use. But while I was away I realized I'd brought a lot of things with me that I thought I would need but didn't, and that that holds true in my house as well.

Decluttering is a sort of ongoing process for me, but in the next month I'm going to be going a little crazy with it.

My first step was to entirely empty a dresser that takes up a lot of space. To do that I needed to make room for the things we store there that we actually need, which is to say sheets. So I got rid of half my clothes in my dresser, and now the sheets can go in my bottom drawer.

I'm going to be going through storage devices with a heavy hand in the next few weeks. It's took easy for me to look at a thing and assume it's neat and tidy if it's stored, when really the storage device itself is untidy or takes up too much space. I'm definitely going to get two dressers that we use for linen storage out of the living space of the house. Plus our excessive collection of bedside tables, and assorted other furniture that is taking up more space than it is making.

I'm also going to do some blog decluttering. I've split various subjects out of this blog over the years in response to complaints or requests from readers, but I think that's not as manageable as I'd like, so I'm going to recombine them. I can then make custom feeds for various topics rather than whole separate blogs. I'm sure that would have been easier in the first place, but sometimes the software lets you get carried away.

In the meantime, I'm working on a video demonstrating Golden Gate Coffee Spinning. It's a traditional Northern Californian technique that has a lot of interesting benefits.

The process from there is simple: after food is withdrawn, the caterpillars will move off the leaves (or what used to be the leaves) and start climbing up. I made them a pile of toilet paper tubes to cocoon in, because they are cheap and plentiful (we collected them for a few months). They climb up and look around for a good spot, trying out a few tubes and spots until they find one that feels just right.

The little guys find a tube they like and make a silk mesh to hang themselves in before they start the cocoon in earnest. Also, one last poop, for posterity:

And another one, this one in the process of expelling the contents of its gut.

There are a hundred different ways of making places for silkworms to cocoon. Professionals and more serious growers put them in a folded chickenwire mesh structure. Lots of people use egg cartons (we have another use for those). Plenty of people use toilet paper tubes, mostly set vertically in a box. I put mine horizontally and made a stack. They don't seem to mind too much.

A few of the caterpillars started climbing up on the toilet paper tubes I gave them right away. But nobody chose a spot until Sunday morning. This is one of the first cocoons, a day later:

This is one of the Ken's Yellow cocoons. The colour is just in the gum on the outside of the silk: if you process it normally, you will end up with white silk. Or you can leave the gum on and have a stiff, yellow silk.

It takes a silkworm about 2 days to spin a complete cocoon, and they stay in the cocoon for about a week before emerging. I don't want these guys to emerge as moths, but I do want them to spin as much silk as possible, so on Friday I will be baking them in the oven to kill them in place. Then I can reel the silk off the cocoons.

See those little dots of black stuff? That's caterpillar poop. You can also see that they're doing a nice job of eating the leaves. They seem to prefer some leaves and will all cluster on those ones, for reasons that are not obvious to me (since I've been putting leaves of same size and age down for them).

I'm using a piece of netting to give them fresh leaves, so they climb up through the net onto the new leaves and I can just lift it out and remove the old leaves.

Only maybe I'm replacing leaves too often, because usually I also have to move several worms off the old leaves at the bottom of the box. On the other hand, I don't want to encourage rot or mold, so changing the leaves more often seems like a good idea. At this point I'm changing them once a day, which doesn't seem like overkill.

Some eggs have just hatched recently, so I have a mix of larger and smaller worms. I can't decide if I'm going to hate myself for keeping them all jumbled together in one box, but that's what I'm doing.

They're teeeny tiny and sometimes they just lie there, and I spent much of the day worrying about them.

They haven't make huge inroads on the leaves I gave them, but I'm not sure I would notice, given how tiny they are.

Tomorrow I will move them to a covered plastic container, but for now the little box I had the eggs in works just fine.

So this is going to be more about my impressions of the class than a post that could get you started on reeling yourself.

First, the equipment. Michael brought some hand reels -- the squat ones are from Japan, and the tall narrow one is made by Alden Amos. A silk reel should let a lot of air in, so the wet silk doesn't stick to the reel and make a mess.

He also brought a couple of Zakuris -- Japanese silk reel winders.

The mechanical zakuri was by far the easiest way to reel silk, but of course (of course!) zakuris are pretty much impossible to get; there is no US maker or supplier. (One side panel of this zakuri was taken off for some reason, but usually the reel is supported on both sides.)

That's the zakuri reel, once filled up.

Some of the other tools are very simple household tools, like a little scrub bob to pick up the ends of the cocoons from the bath:

And this very simple thread guide that we used several times while winding off of reels or bobbins:

A pair of tongs keeps your fingers from burning as you push the cocoons back into the pot.

The most obscure and unusual piece of equipment was one Michael made himself, the croissure, made of copper pipe, pulleys, and some specialized fiber handling parts. This is one configuration for the setup, for Laotian-style reeling (results in a slubbier thread).

The Chinese or Japanese style reeling, which produces a more even thread, uses a taller croissure.

The X in the thread there serves to squeeze water out of the silk and press it together; as you ran the silk through the croissure a fine spray of water flies off, looking a bit like steam.

OK, that said, some photos of the process.

We started on Saturday with Laotian reeling, which is simpler and produces a slubbier thread. I found it more sympatico, I admit.

There's my Laotian-style thread wound onto a reel and tied up to secure it for the degumming bath.

And the same skein, slid off the reel.

Another reel of thread, just to show you how stiff the silk can be before the gum is removed. The seracin is actually used to stiffen fabrics like organdy or to make stiff lamp covers.

Can you see those tiny strands of silk going into the eye? Those are each a single thread from a single cocoon.

Laying out the thread is a characteristic of Laotian reeling.

At the center of each cocoon is a dead silkworm.

The finished product, not yet degummed.

A pile of bobbins. We each got one to take home our reeled silk. Mine is hopelessly tangled.

If you don't want stiff silk, you need to put the skeins through a degumming bath. This is basically boiling it in soap, though there is obviously a bit more to it than that.

The handful of class skeins about to be degummed. It makes sense to degum a bunch of silk at once, as it's as much work to degum one skein as it is fifteen.

My skein, after degumming. It felt more like what we think of as silk. With handling and showing it off, the skein has gotten pretty badly tangled up.

And one of my take-homes. A little packet of silkworm eggs, lying on a mulberry leaf. I have no idea if they're doing OK, because I think it might be a little cold in our pantry for them. But it seemed worth a try.

The first thing you should know about the Fashion District is that if you want photos of the shops and your time there, bring a friend who is a photographer but not a crafty person, because otherwise you will forget the camera and spend all your time on the fabric and so forth. That is why I don't have many photos from the district; it didn't occur to me to take out the camera until I was on the rooftop parking lot, getting ready to leave. That person can also be your package runner if they are amenable.

The second thing you should know is that the district looks large on a map, but you can visit every shop in a few hours, allowing you to scout and take notes and then come back and buy what you want. Unless you're looking at the very last half yard of a fabric you MUST have, there's no need to buy right away. Places start to open around 8:30, and stay open until 4pm.

I ordered a map from the Fashion District web site, but it didn't come until the day after I left. I suggest that if you know you'll be going, order the map at least six weeks ahead of time; I ordered four weeks before I left, thinking (foolishly) that mail only takes two days to get to my house from LA. The map they sent was a letter-sized back and white map showing block numbers and general categories of stuff -- it could easily be put on their web site as a PDF. And obviously, since I didn't have it, it was not necessary.

Here are the hints I followed:

1. Dress comfortably, because you will be doing a lot of walking, and the more you impress shopkeepers, the more they will charge you.

2. Park in a pay lot with a flat rate (I parked at 305 E. 9th St, where the entrance to the garage is paradoxically on Maple, for $5 for the day) in a central location.

3. After buying something, bring the packages back to your car; both because having lots of packages makes you look more likely to spend more money, and because it's a pain to manage packages in the tight spaces.

4. Purses are hard to manage, so use a backpack (I used my Timbuk2 messenger bag; it worked very well except while bin diving at Michael Levine Loft).

5. Bring a notebook to keep notes on where you bought things, places you didn't like, and places you want to get back to, because there is no way you are going to remember. I prepared some pages in my notebook with names of stores I wanted to visit, and took notes on them as I visited them. I also drew a small map of the district with my planned route.

6. Bring cash, because prices are often cheaper for cash.

Here's what I didn't do:

1. I didn't drink water or coffee. Bathrooms are few and far between in the district. There is apparently a coin-pay one at the Michael Levine store, but because I was not loading up on liquids I didn't need to unload. YMMV and your ability to function on less water may be different from mine. Also, it was not a hot day when I was there.

2. I didn't haggle with shopkeepers. I'm just not that into haggling. I did ask about how prices changed for larger quantities (my standard yardage to buy when I don't know what I'm buying for is five yards), and ended up buying more fabric in some cases because of that.

3. I didn't always pay with cash. Not everybody would discount prices for cash, so when they didn't, I paid with credit.

If I were doing the day over again, I would do it like this:

Go on a Tuesday or Wednesday. Some stores are closed on Monday, some on Sunday, some on Saturday. Saturday and Sunday are total zoos, and on Monday much of the merchandise has been picked over and not yet replenished. But Monday worked OK for me. I only missed out on one store I wanted to see.

Start at Michael Levine Loft, where there are bins of fabric to dive into. They open at 9am, and that's when you should get there. It's $2 per pound, and you will find some odd gems as well as a lot of awful, weird stuff. I went there after I'd been to a few shops and found near duplicates of stuff I'd bought for much more. Also, you'd be surprised how much fabric is in a pound. Grab everything that interests you, and then sort out what you want from that. If you have a helper with you, have them hold your stuff so you can get to the bottom of the bins.

After you stow your Loft purchases in your car, work your way around the district, making notes, until about 1pm.

Have some lunch -- there is a cart that sells bacon wrapped hot dogs. Don't think too much about what is in there; just eat it and get ready for the shopping.

While eating your hot dog, use your notes to make a plan of attack. It may be worth it to get a fabric at a store where the price for that fabric is a bit higher, if you're going to buy a bunch of other stuff, because shopkeepers will cut you a deal if you buy a lot.

If you care a lot about fiber content, bring things for burn testing. A lot of vendors have fabrics labeled as silk that clearly are not (I'd just spent the previous day reeling silk, so it was pretty obvious to me in most cases). If a vendor won't let you burn-test a snippet (outside, obviously), they probably have something to hide. Me, I'm willing to buy imitation silk instead of real silk if the price is right, and none of the iffier fabrics I bought were priced too high for synthetics.

So, with all that, what did I get?

This pile of fabric is a little over five pounds, from the Michael Levine Loft. Some of the pieces are simply huge -- one is six yards of lining material. Some are tiny (there's a fat quarter of a funny red embroidered fabric in there).

I got lots of lining material, because it can get expensive and I like to line things. If I were hugely rich, I would always use cotton or silk linings, but I'm not, so I often use synthetics. I avoid rayon linings because they make things unwashable.

Across the street at the Michael Levine store, I got these two fabrics. I got a nice deal on the green stuff by buying the extra yard on the bolt, and it was already on sale for 30% off the (already low) price. The satin was $3 a yard (synthetic, obviously).

I'm half-kicking myself for not getting a couple yards of a really nice orange wool I saw there; it was $25/yard which was way too much, but I didn't see anything like it at any other store. Michael Levine also has a really, really nice section with high-end yarns, which I passed up because I have enough yarn right now.

I got these three in a store I went into by mistake. The district is a bunch of narrow storefronts crammed together, with the only signs being above the awnings overhead (and thus often only readable from the street). I was aiming for the store next door to the place where I bought these. That's an embroidered green (I'm going to make it into a summer dress), an orange lining fabric, and a sheer synthetic. Obviously, it wasn't a total mistake to go in there.

It's too bad a photograph can't capture the sheen of these silks; they're woven so that as they move the colour shifts and shines. This was my big splurge. $10 and $8 per yard. And yes, I tested them.

The district also has craft (mostly cheesy party supplies), bead, and trim stores. I love the trim, but can't quite figure out how I would use it. Someday I will have a truly great idea that just needs some theatrical drag queen trim, and I know where to go. I did get some beads, though. Those big round ones that look like eggs are going to become spindle whorls.

It's like a little diary of the last six months.

In November we went to a Truffle Week dinner at Olivetto. It was very good, but the best dish was the buttered pasta we cajoled the chef into serving us (that's us, always ordering off-menu).

This is our truffle.

In December we went out to a nice dinner in Seattle, and I admit, I put something other than toilet paper in the toilet.

In Portland, Noel got a Maple Bacon donut at Voodoo Donuts (it was OK; dough a bit heavy).

Also in December, a nice dinner at Bangkok Bay (Redwood City) ended with this on my dessert plate.

In March we had our first five-egg day.

One day our neighbor's dog ran away and came to our house (where runaway dogs apparently come in this neighborhood). When I tried to get her to come with me back to her own house, she insisted upon sitting on the knee wall like this.

These were the instructions on a hand dryer somewhere in the Midwest. I don't know how to use this machine.

At the Cheese Chalet, in Wisconsin, a refrigerated case full of odd shapes of cheese. The photo came out really weird.

And finally, this afternoon, Henry and Schwa were having fun with their new cat tree (courtesy of a terrific coupon the SPCA gives you when you adopt an older cat). I was not aware that Henry was limber enough to get into the tube, but he seemed quite comfortable there.

(Deep fryers are totally worth it. TOTALLY.)

So I signed up to take a class with Syne Mitchell this weekend at CNCH (Conference of Northern California Handweavers; we shared the convention center with some kids doing some kind of ninja thing and a coin/stamp collector group).

The class was pretty intense.

In the first part of the class, we did lace techniques. This sample is a couple sizes of leno weaving (more on that in a second) on the bottom, then a row of Brooke's Bouquet (looks like sheaves of wheat in boxes), then a couple rows of a modified Brooke's Bouquet which ends up being more like filet.

Technorati Tags: crafts, weaving

Basically, you cross two sets of warp strands like this over a pickup stick, use that stick to open a shed, and drop a weft strand in there to hold it in place. The next plainweave row reverses the twist so you get that sort of cool cable look. The more strands you twist, the thicker the twists.

Brooke's Bouquet is funkier and involves wrapping the weft around the warp to make little bundles (as small or as large as you want, again).

The modified Brooke's Bouquet was wrapping the warp in a neutral shed rather than an open shed, and by offsetting the next row I made a filet pattern.

Above that filet is a section of "scribbling" with yarn. Mine looks awful: the technique and I did not get along, and I managed to choose the worst yarn for it. Here are some photos of my classmates' scribbles, done with ribbon yarn, that look great:

And:

Above the scribbles are these Danish pattern things that involve lifting a thread of a supplemental warp, as technogeeky as that sounds, and I'm still undecided on how much I like it. I think that subtley done, it might add a nice texture to a fabric.

After lunch we did a bunch of pickup patterns. That's when you use a stick to pick up a bunch of warp threads like this:

(OK, I used my spare shuttle because I didn't have an appropriate pickup stick.)

So you can make ridges and floated threads like this:

That's a 5/1 windowpane pattern.

You can then combine the supplemental warp concept to get a pattern like this:

Notice how I learned from the previous scribble exercise and just used a flat yarn. The ribbon yarn was still a pain in the butt to deal with, but it looked nicer.

Our last pattern of the day was this honeycomb pattern. This was tons and tons of fun to weave. I loved it. OK, in better yarns, with less weird colours, but I liked the results and weaving it was just challenging enough to be interesting and easy enough to be fun.

After class, Heather and I went down to the market floor and checked out the display area. This was very intriguing: both the blue and red were woven at the same time; they just lift apart. I'm sure someday I'll be able to wrap my mine around how that was done.

And now I think it's time to take a little break from taking classes and actually make some stuff.

What on earth would two peacenik commies want from a gun shop? Why, fiber arts tools and supplies, of course. Like this reloading scale, perfect for measuring out dye powder.

Technorati Tags: cats, chickens, crafts, dogs, fiber, travel, weather

The binders fit my Knitpicks organizer pages nicely, don't you think?

The deep sea swivels are for another project I have percolating in my head. More on that when it's fully brewed, if you will.

I did make some purchases at the Spinning Loft. One of them, perhaps the coolest one, was this fine oil pen. Spinning wheels like to be oiled, and a nice little pen like this makes it fun!

OK, maybe not FUN, but convenient. It's even printed with Beth's shop's name, should I forget. And I like the extra cap to protect the needle tip -- the one on my Schacht oil bottle is a little bent from travel.

Anyhow, from Michigan to Alameda is pretty much a haul. Google estimated it at 37 hours of driving, and we actually did it in about that much, which the occasional stop for a little scamper for the girls.

Most rest stops are too heavily trafficked to let the dogs off leash, but sometimes you will find one that is pretty much empty and has a good layout were they can get out of the car and really stretch their legs. And inevitably they will spend the whole time walking sedately and sniffing things near you, saving the urge to run for times when they have to be on leash.

Nebraska had some pretty weird public art going on at the rest stops.

Actually, that was one of the cooler ones. The little petals and flaps moved.

We had pretty good weather from Indiana through to the western part of Wyoming, when we encountered this weird inversion layer:

Beyond the inversion layer was a nice blizzard combined with a dust storm, so as the snow hit the windshield it left behind a white splotch. I basically washed the windshield all the way to Utah. Yay, fun.

We also narrowly missed chain controls in the Sierras. When we checked the road conditions Wednesday morning in Winnemucca, NV, there were chain controls. By the time we got to Donner Pass, the road was clear. When we came down the mountains to Sacramento, we hit the second half of the storm coming through, which would drop 2 ft of snow in the mountains behind us. Yay for timing!

We got home to find Mr. Kitty mostly alive and well (he'd destroyed only a few things and was very very lonely, so he was all sweet and purry for about 24 hours).

We had one casualty: Liza had been looking unwell the day before we left, and she died while we were away. Our neighbor who was checking on the chickens kindly buried her for us. I will miss her.

But we used small rigid heddle looms and made tiny pieces for bags. For one thing, a much more manageable size for a class, and for another, wow, you can do a lot with one technique.

The class was held at the fantastic and awesome Spinning Loft, in Howell, Michigan. I recommend this store unequivocally. Not only was the class managed very nicely (Beth arranged a terrific lunch both afternoons, and coffee in the morning, plus all the wool you could sniff while she had her back turned), but the store is crammed with the usual goodies like wheels and prepped fiber, but also the exceptional, like an entire room full of fleeces. Worth a visit for sure. While you're in town, sign up for a class. There's a 24-hour donuts and ice cream place across the street. Can you beat that?

So, um, back to class. I'm going to refrain from trying to ID everybody in every picture, but that's Abby Franquemont's ear in this one. This is Sara showing us how to do soumak, which is a twining technique. I absolutely must make better use of that than this silly little bag project.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knotted pile, weaving

As you can see, the knots go around two threads. You wrap the loose end of your yarn through the two threads, out the side and back over the top, then back through the threads, then you trim it. When you're finished with the piece you trim the whole thing flush.

Each row of knots is secured by what I think of as two swipes of the weft thread: back and forth. You also work the selvedge as you go, to make a nice secure piece of fabric.

After a day of making the sampler, I sat down that night and worked out a simple design for my bag, drawn with coloured pencils on graph paper. Very architectural and precise of me, though of course I almost instantly messed it up when I started weaving.

But by the end of the day on Sunday, I had a piece I was pretty happy with. And fortunately, I have Sara's book so I can finish it off.

Beth did finish her piece in the weekend, but she cheated because she'd started hers years ago -- decades, perhaps (one of the myths fiber arts hobbyists have is that people like Beth basically get to play all day). But it was lovely, a little tiny piece that says "Spin" with a spindle for the I. We stood around giggling over it when she brought it out of the finishing wash.

That's Beth's extremely capable daughter/assistant Chelsea in the background, surveying the damage we had done to the carpet. She was going to get to clean up after us.

By the end of the weekend, the floor under each of us looked like this:

At the retreat with Judith MacKenzie McCuin, we talked about how useful it would be to have a simple sheet to drop on the floor under your wheel to control fiber. It would be incredibly useful for knotted pile, as well, if you are foolish enough to have carpet in your work room.

And OK, I said I wasn't going to go overboard with IDing people, but one of the things that makes classes great is the people, and this was an awesome class because all the people were wonderful, even the shy, quiet people who worked silently beside me not doing any yelling or getting in trouble and therefore finishing their piece by the end of class.

For example, we all got to see the tougher side of Sandi Wiseheart, as she shows us her mom face.

And we got to see the giddy side, too, because she bought this fine new Schacht Matchless (which I helped her carry out to her car, so it has my cooties on it).

On Sunday night, after class was over, we went to a hibachi restaurant (which turned out to be great fun), where I got to see Rachel work her Older Woman skillz on Beth's hockey-obsessed son.

More people than expected decided to stay for dinner, so we had to wait a long time for a table and then more time for our guy to come cook for us. Everybody was hungry and cranky.

Japanese soft drinks in funky flavours helped ease the suffering.

Then it was back to the hotel for Noel and me, to pack up the car (we planned a relatively early start the next day, which we ended up not getting off to, but good enough).

And yes, this was not exactly a day after the last post, but it's been several days of extremely iffy net connections, so I figured my vast readership (hi, Mommy!) could cope.

We started our visits in Billings, Montana, where Noel's childhood friend Scot led us on an impossibly long hike up a butte. Awesome view, though.

Technorati Tags: flooding, michigan, midwest, minnesota, montana, battle creek, travel

When you're behind the dogs, the view never changes, I guess.

The hike was actually quite nice, because my overall impression of Montana was of being somewhat overfull. We ate at a steak house and I was utterly defeated by my dinner. We ate at a breakfast place and I was also unable to finish. Then Scot made us blinis. So it was very pleasant to get some activity, and once we'd hauled ourselves up the butte, the hiking on the top was very comfortable. The girls had a good time, too.

Then it was on to Minneapolis for a series of family visits. Noel's family has been having a rough year, so it was nice to have time to see everybody without it being a family emergency. Of course, the Mississippi was a trifle high.

This the view down from Fort Snelling to the delta where the Mississippi and Missouri join. Those submerged trees are in a park: you can se a tiny red picnic bench down there right at what is now the water line. Our route out of town was perfectly safe, but the news was full of people angry about flooding taking out bridges and causing massive detours.

We moved on, through Wisconsin, which seems to think it's some kind of dairyland.

We stopped in at the Cheese Chalet to see what cheese they had on offer.

Normally, I'm skeptical of Wisconsin cheese. Not that it's not fine for what it is, but it's generally only a few styles, all not super interesting by my cheese standards. (I like odd little French cheeses wrapped in moldy leaves.)

We got some cheddar and a packet of mozzarella sticks, which is where you want to focus in Wisconsin. We avoided the "snoked" flavour cheese.

And of course a photo with the beeeg cow. It was freezing cold out, of course.

In Battle Creek, Michigan, we stopped in at the home of 7th Day Adventists. They had a fascinating museum of old medical devices, most of them focused on good bowel movements and plenty of sunshine.

This is a colonic machine.

And, well. Just lend a hand, will you?

There's some kind of legend about somebody being saved in a train wreck by an angel or something. Not nearly as interesting a story as the sign on the diorama.

The museum included some interactive quizzes. I got this one wrong.

But as a consolation prize I burst out laughing at the logic.

I find the more contemplative devices more intriguing. The sign said that a light box like this one was on the Titanic.

Also in Battle Creek are those icons of America, the cereal factories. However, they are closed to the public.

Indeed, they looked kind of like prisons (this is Post). I was a bit disappointed that there was really no tourism around the cereal. Apparently cereal companies are super paranoid about espionage.

From there it was on to a weekend in a weaving class. More on that tomorrow!

For me the whole issue comes down to a single question: What should be the consequences of illness?

Should you only get as much care as you can afford with whatever savings you might have? When that money runs out, should the care stop? Should you die in the streets, to be picked up by a trash crew and dumped in a landfill? Should you be treated with compassion and given the best care that makes sense?

All of those options are currently the norm in countries around the world. My own inclination is that misfortune should not be treated as a fault of the person who suffers it. Even when that person contributed to that misfortune. So when somebody is dying from lung cancer after a lifetime of smoking, I still think they deserve compassionate and, yes, low-cost health care. Just the same as I think somebody who is born with a heart defect, who has not contributed anything to society except their presence, also deserves compassionate and low-cost health care.

I wonder what the health care system preferred by people who oppose health care reform would be like? What would happen when you get cancer at 25 and use up your lifetime maximum health coverage getting into remission? What should happen? Would such a person be well advised to get some kind of extremely high-paying job (please let me know where to get such a job) on short notice, so they could pay their health care costs in cash for the rest of their life?

Do those people believe that the death panels that already exist at your private insurance company, who make decisions about whether you will get coverage or not based on whether you are costing too much -- not on whether you have a chance of recovery or not -- is sufficiently compassionate, and anything else would necessarily be less compassionate?

I'm a bleeding-heart liberal. I believe civilized, compassionate people who love their country and their fellow Americans have a responsibility -- one of the ones that comes with the rights we also have -- to take care of the neediest of our people. Some people fill that responsibility by serving in the armed forces, some fill it by volunteering, some fill it by donating money. We all fill it by paying taxes that go to pay for the common good -- to pay our soldiers wages and benefits, to pay for the roads we drive on, to pay for emergency relief to disaster areas.

I'm curious how a person can morally justify believing that we should let others suffer. I've seen people say the current bill is too expensive, ignoring budget office analysis that said it would actually cost less than our current spending. I've heard people say it forces people to pay for something that may not want, but a lot of us didn't want to go to war in Iraq, and it's not as if we're going to get to opt out of paying for that. But I've never seen anybody explain what they think is the right level of caring we should have for the unfortunate. If you oppose the bill, and care to comment, I'm curious to know.

In the meantime, I'm going to celebrate that that lifetime coverage cap that was getting so close is now gone. I'm a personal beneficiary of this bill, or rather, the future me is. And you will all benefit because my ability to get ongoing medical care means I won't go on permanent medical disability and cost you even more money. Win-win!

(As a side note, I also believe that having a health care system that profits on illness and medicalization is a bad idea. It is often (OFTEN) argued to me that without profits, nobody would do the research needed to improve health care the way it has been improved in the last 50 years. That doesn't make any economic sense, because so little of that profit is actually used to reward the people who do the research. First, most medical research relies on federally funded basic science research as a starting point. So we already pay for part of that cost. But then the government hands off basic science paid for the taxpayers to corporations to develop into a product. The profit made by those corporations is used to pay the shareholders of those corporations, and the executive and marketing staffs of those corporations. If we decided to keep all operating budgets exactly the same, to employ mostly the same people in the research and development roles, but to cut out the parts of the business that are wasteful -- executive salaries and marketing budgets -- we could afford to continue to innovate and produce new medical treatments on much lower costs.)

Technorati Tags: politics, healthcare

The theme for this class was colour, and boy was it. I'd already decided I prefer spinning undyed fiber and dyeing it as yarn (and Judith agreed with me!), but it's always good to challenge yourself. It was clear there was going to be some good fun on the very first night, when we found this table stacked with goodies:

Technorati Tags: colour, crafts, dyeing, fiber, judith mackenzie mccuin, knitting, point bonita, spinning

Judith started us out by laying out several large dyed tops.

We divided them in half, so everybody had a spinning twin who did the other half of the same top.

Then we stripped off some equal-width strips lengthwise, putting a knot at the same end on each one so we could align them.

Then singles, taking care to try to be consistent. These are two bobbins spun starting from the same end of the top, ready to be plied.

We made two skeins from those tops: one with the two singles plied starting at the same end, so the colour changes should match up (left), and one with the singles plied starting at opposite ends, so the colour changes were not deliberately matched (right).

From that I knitted up two quick swatches to see how the different methods of blending colour gave different results in the fabric. My top had very regular colour changes, so it wasn't too dramatic, but there is a definite difference.

At the same time, Judith would pause and show us techniques, like when she showed us how to hold the singles for making a 3-ply.

I admit, I tried her way and my way, and my way still feels more natural to me. And gives me better results.

The other interesting work we did involved blending dyed tops.

We chose a few colours of dyed top and tore off forearm-lenths to use. Then we arranged them in our hands and spun across the fiber back and forth, arranging the colours as we wished, to make a variegated single.

I used orange/yellow/red with a dark blue accent colour. Then I spun the singles into a marled 3-ply (I guess I didn't take a picture of the skein).

And swatched it up. Apart from the awkward place where the colours aligned perfectly and I got those two solid stripes, I like how the blending worked on this.

(It's biasing pretty heavily because it's knitted at a tight gauge and because the yarn was not finished before I knitted it up.)

By this time the class was all insane, and we were working like mad. But it was all fun.

Then Judith showed us how to use various tools to blend the fibers.

She showed us how to pull a sliver off hackles to make one kind of blend.

And how to comb different colours together to make another kind of blend.

The sliver of colour that she pulled off the combs was outstandingly different from what she pulled off the hackle. A really interesting effect.

We also got to use the drum carder, which was loads and loads of fun.

A few of us stayed up very very very late on Sunday, making art batts.

At one point, I'm not sure why, we spent a few minutes tossing the batts in the air and chanting at them.

This is my late-night batt. Not very arty, but I don't have anything to prove.

The first time through the carder, the colours aren't very well blended, but you start to see how it will come together.

The second time is when the final colour emerges. I put this batt through four times.

This is what it looked like the next morning, when I dragged myself out of bed against all physical need.

I spun it up as a heavy single, practising the methods Judith showed us for spinning a thicker single.

And knitted it up into the crown of a hat.

Then, at the last minute, I made another batt really quick, so I could make some more yarn and finish the hat. It won't quite match (we'd run out of some of the fiber I used on the first batt), but good enough.

By midmorning on Monday, I was, well, pretty tired.

I'm usually pretty good at pacing myself, and by this point I had exactly enough energy left to finish the weekend and nothing else.

On Sunday afternoon I started work on the dyeing. There wasn't enough room in the dyeing setup for the entire class to do it, so we dyed in batches of five people.

We used crock pots and vinegar, a very low-tech low-stress way of dyeing.

Judith had a very scientific method for applying dye: wet the end of a wooden spoon, dip it in the dye powder, and then dunk it in the pot. Not something you can do with just any dye powder (many are reactive with water), but it works with the dyes we were using.

I wanted fiber dyed to match a copper penny.

I think it came out pretty nicely. I didn't have time to spin it up, but it's in the box of stuff to work on.

On Monday, Judith showed us how to use very very bright colours to make a boucle yarn that knitted up into a nice fabric.

At one point we overdyed that little swatch, but I didn't photograph it. The colours muted down into something really beautiful.

Another thing Judith showed us was how to spin yarn for velvet (or other knotted pile).

Basically: a worsted yarn, 2-ply. You see that shine there? That is because all the fibers are aligned in the same direction, which makes sense as what you would want for pile.

Oh, right, more dyeing.

We also dyed mohair locks, which was really easy.

In the crock pot, with dabs of dye powder.

Lifted out some time later when the dye had exhausted.

Laid to dry on the metal rack.

And my little handful of them, ready to be used in a project.

And we dyed yarn in balls, which was interesting.

You start with a bunch of small balls of yarn.

They get stuffed in the pot, with dye added on the outside and into the center of each ball so there are no white bits.

Which ends up looking pretty interesting. I still need to swatch these to see what it looks like in the end.

At the end of Monday, we were exhausted (and some of the class stayed on for the weaving retreat that is still in progress!), we had piles of samples and bits of fiber to spin that we may or may not have gotten to, we had swatches coming out our ears.

When I got home, I was done. It was a great weekend, I learned a lot, and there's a lot to practise and try out. But what I really needed was to sleep for a few days. Which I have not been doing (more on that later).

The retreat is held at the YMCA hostel at Point Bonita, in the Marin Headlands right on the Northern side of the Golden Gate. The scenery is lovely, and we had lots of time each day to walk around and look at things while recovering from very hard work.

The hostel is in the old barracks, a sort of dismal Cold War kind of series of buildings with weird bunkers overlooking them. It's all open to the public, so random day visitors were coming in and out of the area the whole time (we were warned not to leave valuables or even remotely tempting things in the dorms; thieves seem to leave the spinning wheels and expensive fiber alone, thank goodness.)

That photo above is looking from the classrooms (the building on the very left) towards the dining hall (the two large windows ahead) and the dormitories (men's the furthest away at the far side of the parking lot, women's on the right side of the driveway). If you continued in the direction I was facing here you'd walk up a path on the side of the hill, up the road, and out to the lighthouse.

Technorati Tags: crafts, fiber, point bonita, judith mackenzie mccuin, san francisco, spinning

There was a little bunker over the classrooms.

The big bunker was just up the hill beyond the compound, and we often saw people standing on it and walking around. Not in this photo, of course, because this was taken as I stood in the parking lot at 7am. Day visitors are a lot scarcer at that hour.

The camp has a decent kitchen that serves healthy, local, organic food when possible, some of it grown in their own garden (here artfully protected from the large local deer population). There's no soda available, but this was not really a soda crowd. The classroom also had a refrigerator for our use.

The rest of the facilities are pretty spartan. This is my bunk: I slept up top (because I like top bunks) and used the bottom as a place to lay out clothes and so forth to make it easier to get dressed and undressed in the dark. Not because there were no lights, but because the room was a large one with six bunks, and half the occupants were early-to-bedders, while I was one of the night owl crowd. The facility comes with plastic-covered mattresses, you bring your own sheets and pillow. That worked fine for me, though I did have to buy my first set of twin sheets in many decades.

Part of the reason we had such a large room (there were several smaller ones) was that my fiber buddy Heather brought her brand new (as in, arrived the night before from Schacht) loom and needed to have room to assemble it. The rest of this week is the weaving portion of the retreat, which I am skipping (since I really don't weave that way).

As a note to my future self (I'm going to another retreat here in August), the important things to bring that are not obvious are:
- a set of flannel, twin-sized sheets (not extra-long) -- the flannel because it is always always always cold there, and also because it muffles the crinkling of the mattress
- a pillow, because none are provided
- a comforter or sleeping bag, because it is cooooold
- flip-flops for the shower, because the facility is spartan and the floor is icy cold (I brought flip-flops, but they were designed for somebody with no arches whatsoever, so I need to buy a different pair)
- another sheet, not flannel, for under the spinning wheel, because the classroom is carpeted and fiber gets everywhere
- a nighttime reading light of some sort, for reading in bed and for getting around at night
- tea I like, because the stuff they have there was caffeinated and/or not the kind I like
- some bready snack, because the food was very low on the breadlike objects, and I have a hard time thinking clearly if deprived of carbs. All food has to be kept in one's car or the classroom fridge, because of the critters, but I can handle that

For the spinning portion of the retreat, this is where we spent our days:

In a large circle around the classroom. You can click on that and see the biiiig version. There were a lot of people with Lendrum wheels there, as you can see.

During lunch on Sunday, Heather and I walked out to the lighthouse to see the scene. I was last there more then ten years ago, and because of the intermittent nature of its hours, Heather hadn't been there at all.

This combination of earthy grey-brown with red is one of my favourites. You walk down a trail for a bit, then get to a large rock with a tunnel carved through it. This was at the entrance to the tunnel. When the lighthouse is closed, they shut the door on the tunnel.

On the other side the path winds around the rock, then you come out on the rocky point. At the very end is a bridge, and then the lighthouse.

The bridge is in very poor shape, so only two people are allowed over at a time. You wait in line until the staff (with walkie-talkies) gives you the go-ahead to cross.

The view at the lighthouse, especially on nice clear days right after a storm system has moved through, is spectacular.

For me, the icon of San Francisco will always be the Sutro Tower. We see it poking up from the fog from the beach in Alameda. To me it is far more iconic of the city than the Trans-America pyramid or the Golden Gate Bridge.

Tomorrow, the substance of the retreat.

It was a good time. Orchid people are INSANE. I mean, totally insane. They come up with things like this:

(The theme of this expo was Carnaval, and that's how they spelled it.)

The market was a wonderland of interesting orchids and the occasional related plant, plus one very intriguing service:

(I think orchid boarding would make more sense if you'd spent the $200 some of those orchids were priced at.)

I got a couple of orchids from a friend last year, and I've been enjoying having a cat who doesn't eat plants, so it was fun to walk around and daydream about building a massive orchid garden, or think about what we wanted to do with the greenhouse when we build it. We enjoyed the exhibit area, with lots of really lovely plants at the peak of bloom.

Then afterward we drove to another event downtown in the most glorious sunset. It's been so overcast the last several days that having such a stunningly clear evening was a real pleasure. I think I've driven down this street a hundred times and I've never seen such a clear view of the two Eastern spans of the Bay Bridge (one under construction, of course, but when it's built this view will be terrific on the rare clear day). (And yes, of course they're not as in focus or clear in the photo as they were in person, but usually you can't even tell there's an island out in the bay from here, much less see the bridges on the other side.)

And yes, I admit, I was glad to spend the day shoveling mulch around the garden rather than walking around on another concrete expo center floor. Although the funniest thing has been talking to people today and having them say, "Oh, yeah, we went to the orchid show yesterday." Apparently everybody we know was there.

Technorati Tags: flowers, garden show, orchids, san francisco