"Cat People Are Smarter Than Dog People"

You know, I see headlines like the one from Huffington Post below, and I realize that most people I know now would consider me a dog person. Yet I am solidly from a family of cat people, was raised with multitudes of cats (at one time we had six for a 1.2:1 cat:people ratio).

Well, on reflection perhaps it would be best to say that I was raised in an animal friendly environment. In the first 18 years of my life, we had eight cats, two dogs, anoles, box turtles, fish, rats (rats rule!), an iguana, a garter snake, a couple of hamsters (rats are better!)... I feel like I'm forgetting something.

And for the record, I had two cats when I got my Corgi pup, in addition to dairy goats and chickens. I'd have cats now if I could. And goats. Chickens. Maybe a bunny. Yeah, baby bunnies are cute!

So, what do they say about animal people in general? Hmm...

Cat People Are Smarter Than Dog People, New Study Showswww.huffingtonpost.com SAN FRANCISCO — "Dog people" and "cat people" really do have different personalities, according to a new study. People who said they were dog lovers in the stu...


A few pics of family members gone but not forgotten...  Wish I had more pictures!

The Kool-Aid Dye Project

My fiber guild proposed a challenge this year: dye fiber with kool-aid, make something and display all of the resulting projects in the fiber room at our annual county fair.

Seems like a good idea, but I floundered for inspiration for awhile until I saw someone's fabulous handknitted kneehigh socks on Ravelry.  They had wonderful striping action, and I knew I wanted some for myself.  Now, the socks I admired were from handspun yarn, but I wasn't going to have time to dye fleece and handspin the yarn for the socks.

So I compromised.

Knowing that 100g of sock yarn doesn't quite yield a pair of knee high socks (think mid-calf), I purchased 2-100g of undyed yarn from Knitpicks.com.  Now, I could have dyed the fiber in the skein, but I wanted stripy rather than variegated yarn.  So borrowing a friend's knitting machine (thank you Lindsey!) I turned each skein into matching sock blanks.

Now I had a canvas onto which I could paint kool-aid stripes.

Using Biscuits and Jam random strip generator, I selected my colors and stripe width and repeat parameters, printed out the result and had a guide for my stripe pattern.

The dyeing is pretty easy.  Kool-aid is considered edible and non-toxic (depending on who you ask, right?), and pretty easy to use, with a minimum of prep.  Knitty has an excellent tutorial on dyeing with Kool-Aid, complete with colors achieved from different flavors.

Mixing up the colors, two packets per color.

Ready to dye, the two blanks laid out together.

Wrapped in plastic, ready for microwave "steaming" to set the color.

On display at the fair with other kool-aid projects.  If you look closely you can see the beginning of a toe in the upper left.

Best thing?  The socks still smell like strawberry kool-aid.

There and back again, a fiber tale

It's that time of year again, when vendors, knitters and other fiber enthusiasts descend upon the Santa Clara convention center for the annual Stitches West convention, where there is easily an acre of booths all selling yarn and fiber related stuff.  This is the best opportunity to see indie dyers and craftpeople in person, touch yarns you've only see in glossy pages on through the gentle blue glow of the computer screen.

Last year at this convention I struggling with epic pneumonia, and had no idea how radically my life was about to change.  It was nice to relax and get high on yarn fumes with a few thousand like minded fiber enthusiasts.  It's one of those rare times when my knitting worlds converge into one place, including Auburn Knit Night, MeadowFarm, and Fiber Trash Girls, as well as friends from the blogosphere and Ravelry.

There were pajama parties, great food, and lots of squealing over color, fiber and accessories.  Here's my acquisitions for this year.

Miss Babs' Yowza.  540 yds of luscious hand-dyed yarns.  This is going to become a Harmonia's Rings sweater.

This was the first time I've seen Western Sky Knits, but fell in love with this glitter sock yarn in the Rustic Rainbow colorway.  I've made socks before in the same yarn base, and they're yummy.

Of course I had to acquire more Abstract fiber.  This is Polworth in Lauren Hurst colorway.

And I took my very first stitches class this year, a fair isle for socks how to with Janel Laidman, author of such sock wonders a Sole Enchantments.

Another Coco Knits pattern that just could not be resisted.  I'll have to see what I have in stash to make this...

And, I won this awesome organizer from Chicken Boots in the daily prize drawings.  I had just been admiring Rowen's organizer when other friends informed me that they'd hear my name announced as a winner, and I was thrilled with my prize!

Friends, food, fiber, so much to absorb...  My senses are still reeling with everything seen, touched, tasted, heard and felt.  I'm really going to sleep well tonight!

Unpacking, The Saga

I’m sitting in my new place,  500 sq ft of laminate floors, double-paned windows, European-style fixtures and soft lighting.  I love it.  My first night I unpacked most of my kitchen, much of which has been packed away for nearly eight years.  I happily washed and dried for hours, reacquainting myself with my paternal grandmother’s crystal and glassware, my maternal grandmother’s cast iron pots and pans, my own dishes and hand crafted pottery mixing bowls.  It’s by no means organized, but its clean and unpacked.

Not so with my beloved books.  The shelving is all up, but every time I look at the pile of boxes, I hesitate.  What’s holding me back?  Finally tonight, a week later, I jumped in while dinner was cooking.  Pulled a box off the shelf, opened it, and put it on the shelf.  It’s a box of games, including the fabulous card game Munchkin and Lord of the Rings trivial pursuit.  That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Ok, on to the next box.  Oh, my knitting books.  I’ve had access to those all this past year.  Right, up you go in a place of honor.  Next box.  Some paperbacks.  Excellent, I haven’t read those in over a year, they’ve been all packed up during the divorce and in storage.

And then it hit me.  For some odd reason that I cannot explain to myself, and yet try to share here, maybe I’m not quite ready for these books to come out of their boxes. 

I’ve never been without books, and can barely remember a time that I couldn’t read.  I’ve kept childhood favorites like Hans Christian Anderson, Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, and Anne of Green Gables.  I read and reread old friends like Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Charles de Lint.  New friends too; Kim Stanley Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver and Frances Mayes.  Then there’s the host of reference books; knitting, natural histories, geology, herbals, gardening.  Anyone who’s helped me move knows that I love my books and don’t like to be parted from them.

So upon opening the next box, it hits me, these are intimate relationships I’m reviving.  The oldest of the books have been with me a very long time, and they have anima from being handled so long.  Like the very best of friends, they don’t resent our separation.  They understand and are glad to be welcomed back into my life and on the shelf, but my memories around these books are complex.  The books aren’t different, but I am, and handling them now reminds me that I’m not the same person I was when I packed them away.  No wonder I’ve barely been able to look at these boxes.

Each box, each book, more than any of my other possessions, forces a reminder of who I am, complete with all of the changes.  I’m still not always sure how I feel about all of these changes, hence the hesitation putting books on shelves. How can I reconnect with my books when I’m still figuring out my own story.  This could take awhile…  In the meantime, it’s time to put away dinner and maybe open another box.  

The Green Sweater Project: Dyeing

Another belated post, this time from August 2011.  

In July I started cleaning a Romney fleece acquired locally from a friend in the fiber guild, resulting in about 5 pounds of decently clean wool.  I had decided at some point that I wanted this to be a sheep-to-sweater event, just to say I'd done.  I decided that I wanted a rich, multi-toned green, maybe even a bit heathered. 

So I pulled out my dye sample book and newer color box, picked out the colors that made my heart sing, and set about dyeing.

First is soaking the wool in hot water with a splash of vinegar. 

I found I could comfortably work with about 3/4 pound at a time.  More than that and things got unwieldy, and the fiber didn't have much room to move in the dye pot.  I used a large steamer tray insert in a buffet server to do my immersion dyeing.

Here's a result of the primary color drying on the rack.

I processed a total of six batches over about four days.  Two of the primary green, three of other shades, and one of a fuschia that was supposed to be a bit more salmon as a contrast color.  We'll have to see how that works out during the blending.

More fuzzy babies!

At five days old, Dharma's babies were happily scampering about, so we decided they could be let out of the birthing stall.  I usually do this at around three days, but because Sprawl couldn't walk, we held off a bit.

Turns out it was really good timing.  We heard sounds coming from the pasture that afternoon, and upon investigation we found Maharani had quietly given birth around 2pm to twins.  We each grabbed a baby, dried them off, cleaned out the birthing stall and installed the new momma and babies.  She had a boy and a girl, and just like Dharma's babies, they are both fuzzy.

When all the excitement was over, we found Sprawl, Spunk and Spot piled up outside napping after their first afternoon in the pasture.

I especially love Spot's ears.  She looks like a little bunny.

We continue to give supplemental bottles to Spot and Sprawl. 

A new way to sample

I first leaned to dye samples last year with Sara Lamb and the Fiber Trash Girls.  Then Jan showed up this summer with a dye sample box, rather than a binder.  Using embroidery floss organizers, she samples small amounts of dye, keeping very accurate records of the combinations used, then wraps the small amount of yarn around an embroidery floss bobbin for easy viewing. Her idea was featured in Interweave's Fall Color ezine, Spin Knit. 

I loved this idea, and set out to increase the amount of sample colors I had.  I began by sampling my primary Lanaset colors: turquoise, mustard, yellow, scarlet, fuchsia, and navy and black.  I sampled each at DOS 2%, 1%, .5% and .25% to have a range of tints.  Four jam jars fit nicely into the crock pot for steaming.

I then picked my favorite two-color blends and sampled at 2%, 1%, 1% with a drop of black added, and .5%.  Here's a different selection of greens drying.

Here are a selection of my colors, all wrapped up and ready for their box.

 

This project is by no means even close to being finished, and it'll take me a very long time on my current schedule to fill my sample box.

Kid Update

I think I'll keep posting updates about the babies, especially Sprawl, here, so check back periodically for new information at the top of the post.

We've been feeding Sprawl every 3-4 hours today.  Here he is at the 5:30 feeding when I got home.

Here he's snuggling with the most awesome housemate ever, who's helping take care of him while I'm at work.

Therapy time.  At each feeding we let him try to walk on the pebble walkway or dirt, both of which he manages better than the hay covered concrete of the birthing stall. Oops! 

He's walking/standing better today.  We believe he'll be walking within a couple of days.  He's very vigorous, and has already learned to come running towards ankles.

Sprawl has two sibs.  This is the girl, Spot.  She's got daddy's long ears, with a big, dark-colored spot on the back.  (You can tell we're being very thoughtful with the names here.)

We still need a name for the other boy, seen nursing in this photo.  We'd like to keep the alliterative theme going.

Dharma's fuzzy babies

Back in January I took Dharma over to my goat-partner-in-crime's for a little goat-on-goat action.  I'd missed getting Dharma bred in 2010, and didn't want to miss another breeding season.  So when I failed to catch her again in heat, I made arrangements for her to go on an extended stay with the buck of our choice. 

She obviously came into heat after just three days of exposure to the buck.  We left them together for three weeks, which should have caught two heat cycles.  Goats have 150 day gestation periods, so I calculated out the first day to watch for labor signs as June 17, with a likely day of June 22.  The days came and went...  No babies... 

I had to conclude that she, as well as Maharani, were in fact not successfully bred this winter. Since they were both obviously pregnant, beginning to resemble extra-wide loads, I had to further conclude that they had gotten themselves knocked up by the Angora buck after we moved to new pastures at the end of February.  We share a barn and pasture with a big beautiful Angora buck, a couple of Angora does and their babies, and several sheep.  Well, my girls decided that they liked this big, fuzzy buck, and perhaps they'd like some fuzzy babies of their own.

So based on moving day, I recalculated the earliest possible day they could possibly deliver as July 22.  Sure enough, Dharma at least didn't take long to make friends with the new hunk in her life as she delivered triplets, two boys and a girl, this morning around 3am.  My housemates heard the commotion; I slept through it all.

And they are fuzzy.  One of the boys has long ears, not a La Mancha trait at all. We have fuzzy babies with some dairy conformation characteristics.

One of the boys, the darkest of the three, was having trouble standing, which meant he couldn't effectively nurse. Luckily I had frozen extra colostrum and milk from Dharam's first lactation two years ago.  We thawed the jars and my housemate began feeding the boy on three hour increments while I went off to work.  After the last feeding this evening, the little boy looks like he might start standing on his own soon, and we can stop the bottle feeding. Dharma is a trooper and is taking care of all three babies.

Processing the Fleece, Part I

Last year I acquired a Romney fleece from Lindsey, and there it sat in a garbage bag in my shed for the remainder of the year.  I knew I could pay to have it sent off to one of the mills to be professionally processed, but I wanted to get hands on with at least one fleece, and this was going to be the one.  I just needed the proverbial rainy day to get started.

So finding out last week that I was going to have some extra time on my hands, I decided it was time to fish out the fleece and get started.  I missed taking a before photo, but lets say that it was a yellowish bunch of wool that filled a large trash bag and weighed many pounds.

The first step is to scour, or clean, the wool, which essentially involves soaking the wool in large tubs with a bit of Dawn.  I used two 15-gallon tubs and split the fleece in two.  The first water bath is hot, to open the scales on the wool.  The water was instantly muddy brown with lanolin and dirt.  These were left to soak and cool for several hours.  The process was repeated three times, each time the water being cooler.  (Note that there are both hot and cold water taps outside the house.  Somebody was thinking ahead!)

You have to be very careful to not felt the fleece during the cleaning stages.  Hot water + soap + agitation = felt, so there is no rubbing or squeezing of the fleece.  In between water baths it was gently lifted out as a mass and placed in a giant colander for straining.

Finally satisfied that the fleece was reasonably clean, it was placed in the bottom of the washing machine for some quick spin action.  Again, no agitation.  We went straight to the spin cycle in an old-fashioned upright for some centripetal action.  Look how fluffy after just a minute!

Finally the fleece, being reasonably clean, is left to dry outside on a rack.  I occasionally shift the masses around to expose all of the fiber to dry evenly.  I suspect it will be dry by this evening, and I'll be able to weigh what I have left after most of the dirt and lanolin were removed.