9.25 Banned Books Week

It’s Banned Books Week this week. Whatcha gonna read? I’ve slowly been working my way through the 100 most challenged books of 1990-1999 and then I suppose I’ll have to start on the ones of 2000-2009 that don’t overlap.

This week I’m going to try The Color Purple, which I’ve never gotten round to reading.

9.24 Just because

Test my vocabulary

This way I won't have to go take the test again to remember what it was.

Test your vocabulary?

8.17 Experimentation

The trouble with experimentation is that not all experiments are successes. The nature of the beast - it doesn't stop me from experimenting, and yet, I admit in this case to unreasonable disappointment.

Somehow, I expected this (Spice brown colorslide, Polwarth from Dunnose Head Farm):



plus this (Seal brown, silk noil):



to come out with a little bit more varigation that just plain baby-puke brown:


I keep trying to tell myself that it isn't really quite that bad, but I'm unconvinced.

I think I see an overdye pot in my future, but I'll probably spin it up first.

8.15 Wrapping up TdF

This summer is going by in leaps and bounds - I feel like I'm wearing 7 league boots as the world whizzes by. I've been away on vacation and am now back. Photos from that will have to wait until I post the photos from TdF which finished a week (two?) before I left.

I had plans for TdF, and some of them worked and some got sidetracked. I never got around to posting prep pics for the things that worked, and most of the stuff that I did show was sidelined for other things not originally on the radar.

So, this:


and this:


turned into this:


and then this:


and that is as far as that went.

This:


became this:


and this:


and eventually this:


Interrupted by this:


we eventually arrive at this:


And last but not least, I found a project that had gone awol:


and finished spinning it up, now resting on a bobbin, waiting for something to ply it to:


This never did get started during the TdF:

so progress pics on that will have to wait.

8.14 Daft or brilliant?

I’ve just done something either brilliant or really stupid. I’ve noticed when I do a search on a title in the library catalog that quite often there are multiple books by the same title and it occurred to me that it could be an interesting thing to see what different things could wind up with the same titles. Someone mentioned “Remember Me” a week or two ago in terms that made me write down the title on my “check it out” list, but I didn’t write down the author’s name. There are 12 different books titled Remember Me in the county library - I’ve ordered them all.

7.4 TdF part 2

The second thing I'm working on for the Tour de Fleece is also on a spindle. Ultrafine merino, dyed in Murex purple by Freyalyn. I have 100 grams and I'm shooting for cobweb. Dunno if I'll succeed at that, but I'm trying.



I'm making progress on it, but I doubt I'll finish in the next two weeks...

7.2 Tour de Fleece time

I'm working on several things for the TdF this year. One of them is starting out with the silk hankies from my box-o-fun.



I had given up hankies a few years ago because prepping them hurt my hands too much. ¹ I had been prepping them by poking a hole in the center and then slowly stretching them out into a large circle, before breaking the circle and spinning the result. This puts too much sideways pressure on the fingers and I gave it up and got rid of all my hankies.

Recently, however, someone mentioned spinning hankies by sticking the hook through the middle of the hankie and spinning without pre-stretching. This is working. I still am careful not to spin for too long at a time, but mixing the movements of stretching with spinning in short lengths is being much kinder to my hands that doing the stretching all at once.

I like the result of spinning hankies and caps - long smooth bits of silk mixed with the slubs and bumps. It looks like I'll be able to continue to spin it this way, at least for a while longer.

1 Developing osteoarthritis in the finger joints - it's been mentioned before that getting old is hellish, but now it applies to me. Grump.