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

Anyway, I took two classes, my first time taking classes there. On Thursday afternoon I took "Fiendishly Difficult Stitches" With Merike Saarniit. It was tons of fun. We did four different Estonian stitches (well, one wasn't Estonian, but it might as well have been). Here's my swatch from the class:

I recommend the class to any advanced knitter who is looking to try something challenging for a change.

Yesterday I took an all-day class on pattern writing which was very useful, if not exactly what I was hoping for (I was looking for something more about sizes and math and that sort of thing, while this was more about technical writing; it was still a very good class). The exercise for that class was hand-writing a sweater pattern, and I will spare you that one.

I also enjoyed the market preview and visiting the market during breaks on Friday. I usually like to go on the Friday to the market, because it is less crazy than Saturday, but this Friday was still totally effing insane.

I got a fun little range of things. From the top left, clockwise, a combined measuring tape and pen freebie from a vendor, a roll of highlighter tape for charts, a spinning gauge tool, a package of tubes for storing double-pointed needles, another package with a couple tubes that are slit open so you can store a work in progress, a little pink plastic case that securely holds stitch markets (I seem to lose lots of stitch markers), and a little plastic freebie case from another vendor. I also got a set of blocking wires for lace, but they don't photograph particularly nicely, so I left them out.

And of course I got some yarn.

The big red hank is 500 yards of singles silk from Blue Moon Fiber Arts (you have to dash right to their booth at the beginning of the market preview to have anything like selection), then moving right a hank of Malabrigo Sock (superwash merino), Girl From Auntie sock yarn, and Madeleintosh Sock. Yes, I do know I bought two skeins of the same colour. Apparently I really like orange.

It was a good time. I'll probably skip Stitches classes next year and maybe do Madrona instead, but I always enjoy looking around at the market.

And since I had to be in Santa Clara at 8:30am, I stayed over in a hotel Thursday night. Not internet access, so I brought my spinning wheel, and finished one bobbin and got a nice start on the last one:

I am really getting much better at long draw, and if I hadn't had to stop so often to remove vegetal matter from the fiber, I would have made even more progress. I have one more batt of the black alpaca left to spin, and it has to get done before the end of the Olympics. I think I can do that in a few hours, maybe tonight. But now it's time to go to an orchid show, because I really don't have enough obscure, expensive, and time-consuming hobbies.

Technorati Tags: crafts, knitting, spinning, yarn

I think the more saturated purple works much better.

Also, because it is a rainy Sunday, I give you a little glimpse into how we spent our morning:

Technorati Tags: crafts, dogs, dyeing, ravelympics 2010, yarn

I used the direct warping method, and it definitely seems a lot faster than using a warping baord would be. One step in the process is re-threading every other thread, which was a laugh riot.

But to be honest, it went very quickly and a lot faster than I expected.

And pretty soon I was doing some of the most wobbly and terrible weaving ever. Yes, I do consider this object mostly a learning experience.

Mostly I think the trouble was with the warp threads and how unevenly I tensioned them. There's some crazy stuff happening there.

I did all this while re-dyeing my purple skein. As you can see in this photo, even with the bad colours (I blame the fluorescent fixtures), my purple skein, the last of the dyeing for my dyeing event, came out really, really pale. So after dithering over whether it would matter, I decided it would, with all the saturated colours in the other skeins, so there was nothing to do but stay up late and overdye it a deeper purple.

Technorati Tags: crafts, dyeing, ravelympics 2010, weaving

I finally decided to use some of my masses of undyed worsted-weight yarn and dye it up in the colours I want. I won't get them right on what Mick has, but I do hope to get close. And I have just three days to do it. (It wouldn't be the Ravelmpics without a challenge like that.)

Technorati Tags: crafts, dyeing, ravelympics 2010, yarn

Don't be impressed: I got both the dragon and the Obama picture at the party store. You can be impressed by my outrageously good freehand-cut hearts. I made those with scissors. I rule.

We also had a few decorations from our wedding shower lo those many years ago, so I hung them around:

Those are so pretty I'm just going to leave them there for a while.

Also, we had a minor miracle. Somehow we invited 23 people over and everybody said yes, so we needed more chairs. We went and bought some at IKEA, but we were still going to need to borrow chairs, when one of our neighbors set some perfectly nice chairs out at the curb. Noel dashed down the street and picked them up, I washed them, and we had enough chairs for a very weird dinner party. (Actually, we ended up running out of tables, which is a bit harder to compensate for.)

Anyway, it was fun, but it was too many people. My dinner party brain can only keep track of the needs and desires of guests up to about ten, and above that it's more like "there are many people here, wow."

Now we have a week's worth of dishes to run through the dishwasher (no, we were never in danger of running out of dishes), and Noel put in a special request to just go out to eat tonight rather than cook anything after two solid days of cooking. After that, I'll be eating leftover pasta and meatballs for a week or so.

I decided to do a few events to help motivate me to finish up some projects (or get started on them). This afternoon I organized all the pieces for those projects.

This is my kickoff project: a baby romper I started five years ago and stopped because I didn't like the shape (and was making it from acrylic for washability, so it couldn't be blocked into submission). I decided to rip it out and reuse the yarn.

My second project, the big one, is finishing spinning the black alpaca I'm going to use to make a sweater for Noel.

I'll also be doing some dyeing. I'll use chemical dyes rather than natural ones because I want specific colours that aren't easy (or even possible) to get with natural dyes.

Technorati Tags: crafts, dyeing, fiber, knitting, spinning, wool, yarn

I spent most of the day doing animal handling -- that's pretty interesting to me and it seemed like they had plenty of people to deal with the fleeces -- and she spent the day dealing with the fleeces.

I've put my (numerous) photos after the cut, and I'm still editing the video I shot.

Technorati Tags: fiber, shearing, sheep, wool

Inside, we had two lovely fleeces, one from Sue Reuser (Flora, about 5 lbs), and one from Merry Meadows (Chloe, about 3 lbs). Both white, obviously, both Cormo. Both nice (though Sue's was the nicer, I admit).

After trading some with my lovely fiber buddy, I have slightly less of each plus a bonus bag of Merino. I'm not sure how it worked out that I thought I gave away a bunch of fiber and yet I think I ended up with more than I started with. There's some kind of fibermath going on there that is not entirely obvious to me.

Anyway, I think I might be set for fiber for the time being.

Technorati Tags: fiber, spinning, wool

It was lovely. Here's the view from our hotel room:

We were a couple blocks from the Space Needle. It's much prettier in the fog than the last time we were in town, when the weather was warm and sunny and clear.

We saw the library, which is far more beautiful in context than in the publicity photos that somehow remove the entire city. We saw the Experience Music Project (hard to miss it, really) which still looks like a pile of dirty laundry. We had a nice dinner at Flying Fish. And on the way home, we went to Voodoo Donuts in Portland and got hassled by the recreationally homeless, which is apparently a local sport/tradition.

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Anyway, this will just graze over what I've been doing. I've put it in the extended entry because it ended up being a LOT of photos.

Technorati Tags: county fair, crafts, fiber, knitting, lace, spinning, wineries, wool

The first class was about mordanting. Kristine uses aluminum sulfate, which is a garden additive and thus relatively safe as a mordant. Many mordants are made from heavy metals like chromium, and they can be difficult to handle and dispose of.

We did our mordant bath in this large aluminum pot. Usually aluminum is a bad choice for dyeing, because it is highly reactive -- even the aluminum in this pot has an effect on the mordant. But if the effect is what you want, then what the hey. This almost looks like one of those crazy turkey fryers, but it is actually for making fair food, which brings us right around to my theme for the summer, which is Stuff Yourself Silly With Fair Food.

The mordant pot can be reused many times, adding more aluminum sulfate and water as you go. Eventually it gets really murky and needs dumping. If you happen to have hydrangeas, they love the stuff. So do most acid-loving plants.

After we'd weighed out our fiber and put it in the pot to stew for an hour, we sat around and talked about dyestuffs. You can buy concentrates of many natural dyestuffs if that's what suits you -- the benefits are a certain kind of predictability that is useful when you are dyeing on a commercial scale.

These are (dead) cochineal bugs. They live on prickly pears, and they make everything red. They are a foodsafe red dye -- any natural red colour in your food comes from these bugs. I'm thinking of giving some to a chicken as an experiment -- will the bugs turn the eggs red?

The concentrated powders are interesting to handle. This is a pot of Lac, which is where lacquer comes from. Many people have a strong allergic reaction to this, plus it smells terrible. That's why there's so much in the pot.

We talked quite a bit about the properties of each kind of dye, how mixing different things in changes colour, and on and on. My interest in natural dyeing is pretty academic, at least on this scale. I'd like to plant some dyestuffs and dye with my own plants, but I'm less interested in dyeing from concentrated powders produced in a plant somewhere.

Our next class, we dyed. The fiber had been sitting, damp, soaking up mordant all week. Now we mixed up a concentrated dye solution, put the fiber in it, and then put the fiber into mason jars.

We put the fiber into a dye bath in a bucket first, to get it all soaked up with dye. Then we stuffed it into the mason jar.

We set the caps of the mason jars on top loosely, then put them in water baths on the stove to heat up for an hour.

When they cooled down, they were set aside in their jars to sit for a week. You can get different effects by soaking the fiber for more or less time.

This is what greeted us this last Sunday. Twelve shimmering, jewellike mason jars full of fiber. You can see the dyes we used: pomegranate, madder, madder with cream of tartar mixed in, quebracho red, logwood grey, and logwood purple.

Our last class was all about washing. You can use a lot of water in washing that just gets wasted (if you don't have some kind of greywater system). So Kristine showed us how to waste less and get more out of the water we did use.

The key to not felting the fiber together is to handle the fiber as little as possible, but the key to saving water is pressing as much water out of the fiber as possible before each dunk. It's a balancing act.

When we finished, everybody had about an ounce of each colour to take home and finish drying. I'm thinking of carding mine together to make some batts of a larger amount of fiber so I have enough to make a real project.

I'm looking forward to taking more classes on natural dyeing, especially a dyer's garden class they're still working on developing.

Technorati Tags: art, crafts, fiber, dyeing

This month's theme is Fleece to the Finish, and the goal is to go from new fleece to finished yarn in one month. Now, I don't have much for new fleece hanging around the house, but I do have that black alpaca I've been very lazy about spinning. So I'm using this month to motivate myself to spin up as much of that alpaca as I can. It's destined to be 3-ply yarn, to be knitted into a warm (VERY VERY WARM) sweater for Noel to wear while biking across San Francisco every day. I'd like it to come out somewhere in the fingering range, which it might be; I'm not consistent enough to be sure of what my gauge is before the yarn is finished. When it's made into yarn, I'm thinking of overdyeing it with a purple to give it a more inky colour, and reduce the rusty look that naturally black animal hair always gets.

Here's my starting point: I had 19 batts of alpaca. Of those, I'd spun up one and a half onto two partial bobbins (I started one, took it off for a class, then misplaced it for a few days, during which I started another).

Here's bobbin #1 (which was really the second one I started while looking for the real first bobbin; sorry for being confusing, but I decided to number them by the order in which they are completed, not started):

And bobbin #2 waiting in the wings:

Hmm. I should count my remaining batts, because it kind of looks like there may be two and a half batts on these guys, not one and a half.

Anyway, last night I sat down to spin for at least an hour. We ended up watching a couple of movies (one documentary on TED, and Spies Like Us, both of which were disappointing in their own ways). But I did get a lot of spinning done, and ended up finishing the partial batt I had in the project bag. And here we are:

Tonight I plan to spin at least half a batt. That'll fill this bobbin and get me onto bobbin #2. I'll try to be less sloppy about my bobbin, too; filling it this unevenly can lead to twists and knots in the singles, which is Not Fun.

The plan is to spin three bobbins full of singles, then ply them together until all bobbins are empty, repeat until done.

Technorati Tags: crafts, spinning, yarn

That's washed on top, of course. Both locks were about the same size; this stuff poofs up very nicely in the bath. And the lanolin is very light, which is welcome. I just gave it one go-round in the soapy water (well, I actually use shampoo, because if it works on my hair it should be OK for fleece), and all the grease was pretty much gone.

The fleece is a cormo, entry #1193 from Sue Reuser, who as far as I can tell pretty much doesn't know how to produce a bad fleece. I'm thinking I may buy direct next year, if I have any need of fleece at all (which seems a little unlikely given how much fiber I have now and the fact that I'm going to two more fiber events before the end of the year).

Technorati Tags: crafts, fiber, wool

I loved this fleece, but it went for way more than I could have possibly afforded:

Also, looking at it, I realized that I really do not want massive amounts of coloured wool. This was light enough that it would dye decently, but still, being grey took some value off it for me, as lovely as it was.

Not that there was not plenty of fleece:

Anyway, for the next few hours I sat and followed along on my auction list while knitting away at my latest project, which is the Icarus Shawl that was in Interweave Knits a few years ago. It's a nice, mindless lace pattern for most of the shawl, so modulo needing to be able to count while the guy was calling all sorts of numbers out, I made decent progress.

(I'm knitting it in some laceweight hand-painted alpaca I bought a couple of years ago and wanted to use up. There's nowhere enough shawl to use all 2400 yards, but I have a sort-of plan for the leftovers.)

Fiber buddy hlf bought three fleeces, one of which we're splitting (um, I think it might be the one under her at this point; she was a little giddy). We dropped them all off to go to Morro Fleece Works. It will eventually be delivered around November or later.

I think I'll end up with a few pounds of pencil roving, which is nice and easy to spin. Although I am happy with the fleece and excited about getting the end result, the drawback to buying at auction is that prices are very high (in auctions, the winner always ends up paying more than the object is worth because by definition nobody else was willing to pay that much). I think I like events like the Spinning at the Winery day better; the pressure is lower and the prices are better.

After the auction, we had lunch then made a brief tour of the livestock pavilion. This sweet grey alpaca flirted with us when it kind of looked like we might have edibles in our bags (if we did, the alpaca wasn't getting any).

And then the long drive home in the usual terrible Sunday traffic. I forgot how backed up it gets even on 101 coming North. I was always driving against it back in the school days; Noel was the one who'd get hit with that stuff coming back from a weekend with me in SLO.

I was intrigued by this place:

I guess they had really sold out, then.

Technorati Tags: county fair, crafts, knitting, lace, spinning