renaissance poisson

i'm watching a lot of spinning videos -- hey, it's hibernation season, and i've dusted off my spindles and wheel. my absolute favourite is spin art by jacey boggs. i bought the book when it came out, but it was above my skill level and i just admired the shiny. then i saw a short video by jacey boggs on youtube, and really liked her style, and so i bought the bonus video for the book. because spinning is much more easily learned from a good video than from reading.

it's dirt cheap for what you get; U$9.95 for 90 minutes of focussed instruction on spinning textured yarns. jacey boggs is an amazing instructor; she's clear, direct, thorough, funny, and she knows her technical stuff. after watching an hour of rambling repetitiveness by sara lamb spinning various kinds of silk during which i didn't learn anything much new (when i KNOW i know hardly anything about it), this was a breath of fresh air.

there are several things here i like: jacey shows the finished yarn, a knit swatch, and then she uses the exact same fibre with the same colours to demonstrate, so there is a clear progression from raw material to finished product. she shows the technique at speed, and then slowed down, several times. she shows common errors and what those mean, and how to correct them. the camera focusses tightly on her hands when it's important, from different directions, keeping the important bits in the field of view.

i wish they'd get her to teach most of the other instructors how to teach. i've also just watched a video with maggie casey, and while she is a very pleasant lady, her explanations often leave a lot to be desired; it feels like even though she is clearly an accomplished spinner, she doesn't actually fully understand the physics of a spinning wheel. or maybe she thinks it's too complicated to explain, and nobody would want to know? or she thinks the touchy-feely stuff is better? except that doesn't work for me; physics is not a dirty word; it helps me understand WHY something works, which means if it doesn't work i can figure out easily why not. touchy-feely isn't good for distance education. the person she's teaching in the video, eunny jang, seems a bit more technically oriented; she asks the questions i'd ask, but she is also very deferential, so she doesn't press when she gets a so-so answer that doesn't fully explain. the whole video feels very awkward to me, and i haven't started the second part yet because it's no fun. i've learned more about adjusting a wheel from jacey boggs -- incidentally. also, i now want a lendrum wheel, *snicker* -- so easy to adjust!

something else i've noticed about which i feel weird: jacey boggs wears no nail polish and her nails are very short and clean. now, how somebody keeps her nails is absolutely her own business, but in a video on spinning, or really anything where something done with one's hands is in close-up focus, my eyes get distracted by shiny polish or long, curvy nails interacting with the fibre/yarn. now i wonder whether nobody else cares, and i am just easily distracted.

oh wow, i just came across this while looking for something completely different, and it is amazingly useful:



also, lucy neatby rocks, and not just because she has the best hair.

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very productive day -- the paramour went geocaching, and i worked in the garden. fastened the umbrella dryer again since the strapping tape had disintegrated, braided some rope and tied back the hedge cedar that had intruded too far into the walk way, finished filling the new hexagon and planted the japanese willow and suriviving lavender, set up my little wading pool and filled it.

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am about 25% into the non-patriotic non-pizzazz top. really like the drape of this yarn , and the feel; slightly cool and ... textury. oh yeah, the words are really magical today, *snrk*.

below is a sample of the wool, above the 2 bobbins. i'm quite pleased with how the singles came out; it's not hideous for a first effort. i ended up using mostly a modified longdraw. the prep wasn't right for an actual one, i had to keep more control over the twist because the fibre release from the draft wasn't always even. but drawing long was generally much faster and also smoother, and it gave me lots of room in which to smooth out occasional blobby bits. it'll be thick-n-thin in places (beyond beginner's accidents), because i was purposefully trying to spin as thin as possible at times, and later also to spin specific thicknesses.

i really like the variegation of the wool; it goes from a very light grey to a very dark one. i bought about a pound and a half; wonder how much yarn that's gonna make.

and now i learn to ply.

my babe's fiber garden spinning wheel. (with bonus cat, bang! who wandered into the shot.)

i'm so excited!!!

i have no time to post more about it, because i want to spin some yarn!

if you were following my twitter yesterday, you already know all about this, because i couldn't shut up, i was too thrilled.

yes, i am easily thrilled. :)

i've lusted after a swift for a while because they're just enormously handy. the paramour refused to step in as the human version, i was getting tired of using the chair method, and the lovely umbrella swifts one sees in local yarn stores are way expensive.

i was feeling inventive last night, and didn't want to google (just for the challenge). the paramour was perfectly happy contributing superior kludge-meistery. a cardboard box, 4 toilet paper tubes, a former dogleash swivel clip, a cup hook, some polypropylene rope, and some practical math -- and a while later we had our first prototype:

it hangs from the ceiling, because there is no free horizontal space where i could place a tabletop model. the bridle keeps it surprisingly stable; i had expected to put a counterweight underneath the box, but its not needed. a slight resist in the swivel also (serendipitously) keeps just the right tension for the ballwinder.

i've since googled, and it looks like nothing else out there, *snicker* (though i don't think it is any worse than the "lazy susan with coat hangers and duct tape" model). we've also had some other ideas on how to make cheap swifts, but i think this is the most stable model of the lot.

today i am building prototype II with movable pegs so it can accommodate different size hanks.

via anavoog who got it from somebody else who found it on the net somewhere.

awesome. he designs his own clothes and crochets even on the subway. i wanna hang out!

the paramour just left, after the first flight was cancelled. the fog was sitting pretty low here, but it must have been vancouver that had the real problem, since the later flight just took off in worse fog. anyway, that one has landed in vancouver, and i am hoping that 1 hour and 10 min is enough time to get through immigration and customs, so that zie'll catch the connecting flight to LAX.

and of course, to be properly ironic, i had for once made plans for today. ha! i keep telling people that not making plans is much better because one is rarely disappointed. :) it wasn't anything big, just that i had charted out a series of experiments in my mind.

see, when i got into polymer clay i really enjoyed most of it, except for the baking. the baking is annoying as all get-out because our oven not only doesn't heat to the temperatures indicated on the dial, no, it also produces weird spikes. and polymer clay does have a narrow range within which it will bake solidly, yet not discolour or worse, burn. so, i bought a toaster oven at the salvation army store. but that didn't work out because the heating element is too close to the pieces that need to be baked, unless they're fairly small. *grump*. early on i saw the warnings on the packages about NOT EVER microwaving it, so naturally, i had to try that -- and those warnings seemed quite correct. a mere couple of minutes in the microwave produce a crisply burned polymer clay piece and very noxious fumes.

that put a serious dent in my experiments with polymer clay, and i put it mostly away and did other things. but yesterday when thinking about artsy things to make for people who commented on the meme a few days ago, i thought "hey! so it burns when put directly into the microwave. but what if i were to immerse it in water? in a container that does not conduct lots of heat?"

so that's what's in the microwave right now, some scrap clay (which is an amalgam of super sculpey and leftover bits of premo). i watched the first cooking (15 min) very closely, and nothing terrible happened. some slight fumes are emitted (the window behind the microwave vent is open), but no worse than what emanates from the oven when baking the clay. and it did bake, all the way through the beads, though not quite as hard as i would want it to be (fingernails leave an impression). so i'm cooking the batch again, for 20 min this time.