Playing Catch-Up

I am taking an intermediate spinning class at my LYS, Golden Willow Natural Fibres, and really enjoying it. I had thrown my older, much more portable camera into my bag of fibre weeks ago, but kept forgetting to take it out when I was at class. Last Thursday I finally remember that I had it and so I took it out to take some pictures and found that the memory card was full. There were pictures on there from over a year ago. Can you tell that I really hate that camera? If someone in the room so much as breathes funny the picture will be out of focus. But I did find a few pictures that weren't too bad.

This one of Christopher, Katie and Dallas is from last July when we were at a Saskatchewan Roughrider football game. Saskatchewan is home to the most fanatic football fans on the planet. The local saying around here is that we bleed green. Life pretty much stops in Regina when the Riders are playing. Even my 94 year old grandmother, when she was still alive, would watch the games. Instead of lullabys we sing the Rider fight song to our babies.

We love our 3-down football.

These next two pictures are from the end of August on the day before school started. It was a very hot day so we said good bye to summer with a bunch of friends at a pool and park. What I wouldn't give for some of that hot weather now.

Christopher has always been my water baby.

And finally the pictures from last weeks spinning class. The topic for the class was spinning cotton. I had a couple of "aha!" moments where all of a sudden the cotton started to spin properly, but they were few and far between. My sister Susan was having better luck with spinning cotton on her wheel with the lace flyer and bobbin attached.
Shannon, on her brand new Babe wheel.
Our class instructor, Deborah, showed us how to use a charka.
From left to right: Carol, Deborah, Shannon and Amy (who was a natural at spinning cotton on a wheel). As you can see, Golden Willow is a wonderful place to just drop by to sit and knit for awhile.

Next Thursday is our last class and hopefully I will remember to not only take my good camera, but also remember to use it.

My Memory is Just Not What it Used to Be

The other day I pulled out some fibre that I had dyed this summer and found that I didn't have a clue what kind it was. And then I had two skeins that I had spun and couldn't remember which was which. So either my memory has seriously deterioated or I had dyed and spun more than I thought I had. Either way it was time to start organizing a little more.

I am taking an Intermediate Spinning class at my LYS and a couple of weeks ago we covered wraps per inch. So my project yesterday was to get all my spun fibre on bobbins and get some proper records made.

Obviously, the little key chain that the bobbins are on is not going to last very long, but it was interesting for me to see my spinning progression as I have them in the order that I had spun them starting with my very first finished yarn.

Good thing for the blog because otherwise I wouldn't have remembered the order in which I had done them.

The Andalusian socks are coming along nicely. I haven't been rushing to finish them as I am in the process of spinning up some more fibre. When I had first finished the yarn and weighed it I only had 76 grams, which confused the heck out of me. I should have dyed well over 100 grams since I know that is the minimun that I need to finish a pair of socks for myself. I couldn't figure out how I lost so much in the dyeing and spinning process. Well, turns out that I didn't. I just lost it in my mess around my knitting chair.