Can it have been more than a month since I've last posted? Honestly? I guess it would be an understatement to say that I've been busy. But a whole month? Geesh.
In the weeks since I last posted I have been to Dallas, TX, Portland, OR, Brighton, MI and Denver, Co. This Saturday I'll be teaching in St. Clair, MI. In a couple weeks it will be Duluth, MN. Who schedules these things?
The only sewing I've done has been step outs for a couple of new classes, and some mending. Mending! Hubby likes to pull the corner off of his shirt pockets. It's an engineer thing, probably due directly to the death of pocket protectors.
I have been spinning, though. It's been my quiet respite from the noisy world. It's so calming that I sometimes almost doze off. I'm making stuff that more or less would pass for actual yarn. And I've been reminded that my goal is not to try make my handspun to look like commercial yarn, because I can buy that. I still have a lot to learn. Having finally figured out how to spin fine enough to make sock weight yarn, I am struggling to get back to sweater weight yarn. Good thing thick and thin spots are all part of the beauty of handspun yarn. (That's my story and I'm sticking with it.)
To continue my current state of crazy, I just bought a rigid heddle loom. It's just a wee thing, not a behemoth floor loom. I figure I can weave up all of this newly spun yarn faster than I could ever possibly knit it. It's another new thing to learn, with an entire new vocabulary. But I've gone from "what the heck does that mean?" to understanding the basic techniques. So far I've woven a nice set of placemats, which is sort of like buying a $XXK sewing machine to sew straight seams. Oh wait, I did that too.
Of course, all of this falderal means I now have two new stashes to make room for. Wool for spinning is light weight, but very bulky. And then there is the yarn that I've spun. My "limited" space for stashing yarn is now bubbling over into my sewing space.
The yarns for weaving come on ginormous cones. Where on earth am I going to store those? And the tools! It's a 24 inch loom, the heddles and shuttles are 26 inches long.
On the quilting front, I did manage to find 16 fat quarters to bring home from Denver. They are for a project for a special edition of Quiltmaker Magazine, which will be out in the fall. Since my deadline is mid-May, I think I'd better get cracking on that.
I think I need a fiber intervention.
