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I’m busily making carded batts to take to the Whidbey Spin-In. The ever-generous Mary B. (also known as The Other Mary Black) has lent me her drum carder again, so I’m happily blending color and texture. I acquired some carbonized bamboo that is pretty nifty, and am blending it with silk and Merino wool.
From left, carbonized bamboo, tussah silk, Merino.
After carding on a base of BFL, here I’m applying the bamboo directly to the main drum. I find that this works well with these very fine fibers that are already in a parallel alignment. I also do this with the silk. After building up about three layers, each composed of Merino, bamboo, and silk, I top it off with a little more Merino, then take it off the drum.
Mmm, fiber!
Here’s my batt inventory so far:
- Going batty
Most of them are BFL/silk blends. The carbonized bamboo is so dark that it can’t be used in brighter colors. These batts aren’t going into my Etsy shop, but if any interest you, let me know and we’ll make it happen. They are $5. per ounce and run about 2 ounces each, with the price prorated to actual weight.
Evidently yes. A combination of time on their Welsh shepherding hands, too many sheep and dogs, and support from Samsung LED Technology, gives us this brilliant gift to the world. Enjoy!
[ youtube= http://www.youtube.com/w/?v=D2FX9rviEhw]
I do some dyed rovings that slowly graduate from one end to the other, either in color or intensity of hue. To show this off to customers, I form them into circles, but then need something to support the floppy roving. I was using these cardboard circles,
which do the job very nicely, but are expensive, as they are Wilton’s cake base cardboard. Fifty cents each. Adds up. Then I had a vision of another type round cardboard, inexpensive, already on hand:
Paper plates. They are smaller in diameter and don’t make such a perfectly round display with all the roving coiled up on it –
but it’ll do nicely. And being smaller they fit into my tiered plate stand.
Looks good enough to eat, eh? Especially if you are on a high fiber diet 
Another Snow Event here in the Puget Sound Area, and I really don’t want to schlep out to get more suet cakes, yet worry about the birds finding enough to eat. My jar o’grease that I keep in the freezer has very little in it, so I decided to make a nutritious goo of peanut butter, rolled oats, and Crisco.
.
I stuffed this into the bird feeder and put it out in cherry tree in the front yard.
I hope they like it!
Meanwhile, I’m inside busily dyeing Blue Faced Leicester roving to get ready for the Whidbey Spin-In, April 4 and 5. I’ll have a table on the 5th only.
Got wool? Oh, yeah.
We pulled into New York right on time. Here is Greg contemplating The Big City — someone out there must know the name of that bridge, right? A quick stop at our hotel, then off to a late power lunch with Greg’s agent, Richard Curtis, and Greg’s new editor, DongWan Song of Orbit.
That stylish chalkboard is at Five Napkin Burger, which has very good burgers indeed, even if the meat hooks hanging from the ceiling are a little alarming. I actually didn’t have a burger, but a plate of the cutest tiny tacos ever, since I knew dinner was coming pretty soon.
And what a dinner it was! Lisa, AKA Tsock Tsarina was kind enough to come in to mid-town Manhattan from the wilds of Long Island with her sweetie, TheBoy ™ in tow. We decided that since Pigalle , the restaurant in the hotel, offered Cassoulet with Duck Confit for a very reasonable price, it was worth a try as well as an easy transition from meeting in the lobby. Then, upstairs for Show and Tell with better light. Lisa did some spindling
while I fondled the sample socks from last year’s Flock Sock Club. I also got a preview of the first sock for this year’s club, the magnificent Fearful Symmetry, which is burning brightly on the far right.
The next day, a trip to the Morgan Library, then another power lunch that I didn’t get pictures of, with Roger Cooper , publisher of Vanguard Press. Following that, a stroll down to the Flatiron Building, home of Tor Books. The Flatiron Building, by the way, really does look just the version brilliantly done in Legos here (scroll down a bit).
We chatted with publisher Tom Doherty, who has what must be one of the coolest office in NYC, in the very tip of the Flatiron Building.
Then we whisked our back uptown via subway to rest up for our evening get-together with members of The Gunroom. John, Katherine, and Hugh joined us for a peripatetic evening that included beer at the Blind Tiger Alehouse, dinner at Excellent Dumpling, take-away cannoli from an Italian place that I can’t find the name of, and a brisk walk out onto the Brooklyn Bridge, where Hugh pointed out various sites associated with George Washington and the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. We do like a little history with our food.
Katherine is another knitter extraordinaire, and brought along the socks she has knitted from my yarn. I do love seeing how the yarns knit up!
The next day we had time for a quick trip to MOMA, which had this interesting installation of braided roving in the window.
All too soon it was time to dash back to the hotel in the light snow to pick up our bags and head to the airport.
New York has theaters! Note to self: next visit, make time to take in a show.
