Fiber Fool

Anyone good at behind the scenes web stuff? I have someone stealing content from my blog and I cannot find a contact for them. I’ve tried Who Is but it doesn’t turn up any useful info to get in contact with the thief or the company providing the web hosting, it just tells me who it is registered with.

Okay, don’t say I didn’t warn you, but I feel in serious need of a rant, and not just about yarn. I’m a bitch on the rampage, probably hormone induced so this is going to be a post with random rantings, only the first of which is about yarn.

I just recently picked up two balls of Regia Silk, being terribly excited that it was now available locally. It retails for roughly $9 a ball and two balls are needed for adult socks. Certainly not the most expensive sock yarn out there, but not the cheapest either. I was falling in love, though I wasn’t too enamored with the fact that I kept getting big masses of yarn pulling out of the center of the ball. But, that happens sometimes. Well, yesterday I was knitting along on my design tweaking of the Mash-Up Madness sock when I hit this massive rat of fiber. Not simple a knot, but a huge ratty mess of fiber about the size of a shooter marble. It’s relatively dense as well. I can’t seem to get my mind wrapped around how something this large would make it through all the mill equipment completely unnoticed so that it ended up probably less than 50 yds into my ball of 219 yd ball of yarn! Wait, that massive fiber blob probably took away at least a yard of my yarn, plus 6-8 inches for tails for weaving in ends.

I’m a spinner. I understand you can’t keep an uninterrupted string of fiber going forever. But this is not a simple knot. Not to mention, knots in a 200m ball of yarn tend to annoy me as well. 300-400 yds, I get, but it shouldn’t be that hard to have a 200m run of good yarn. *sigh*

I think I have become the witch of the neighborhood. Last year, a boy kept leaving his bike in our driveway so one day I took it and locked it in our garage and left a note that his bike would be returned when he brought a parent with him to collect it. This same boy now has a passel of boys with him daily (none of which live on our block) to play in the open space behind our house. This is an open space in which they have been trying very hard to return it to native vegetation and they are back there blithely running over plants with their bikes and running and skidding to break down the grasses and expose dirt. At the same time they are screaming at the top of their lungs. I understand, they are boys and have energy to let out, but what is with the parents never checking to see what they are up to and teach them about respecting the plants and nature and having respect for the fact that are playing right next to other people’s homes (one of which has a baby who is quite likely napping at this time) and that while they are outside they still should be mindful of their decibel levels. Grrrrrr!

Another house on our block last year had a two year old standing out in the middle of our street who did not get out of the way, nor were they aware enough to get her out of my way. I had to get out of my car and take her to the sidewalk. Well, I now see how that happened. Eveidtenly they just don’t care if their children get run over so they don’t teach them to stay out of the way of vehicles. Their ~9 year old girl just did the same damn thing. I saw she was in the road when I went to get into my car so I creeped out of the driveway and near where she was playing figuring by the time I made it up the street that far at 10 mph she’d be out of the way. Wrong! I had to come to a complete stop. I honked on the horn. I only hope the adrenaline spike I caused her will be remembered so she gets the hell out of the road next time. I realize we live on a cul-du-sac, but I’m still in a car and they are still in the street. I don’t mind if they play in the street as long as they pay enough attention to move off the street when a car is coming.

Our neighbors are not the only ones with this problem, however. Yesterday I happened to be heading home at the same time the nearby Jr. High got out. I was traveling on a very busy street with a 40 mph speed zone and was just outside of the 20 mph school zone. I was about to turn off of said busy and fast street onto a neighborhood street and there is a junior high girl standing 3/4 of the way across said street rolling herself a cigarette and much too busy to get out of the way. Meanwhile, 10 cars pile up behind me and are honking at me to make my turn because the trees are such that only the first couple cars behind me could have seen that the problem was an idiotic teen smoker who not only rolls her own cigarettes, but can’t make it 200 yds from the door of the school before she has to roll one.

I guess I’ve crossed that 30 mark and I can now say (not without feeling rather old) - what the hell is it with kids today? My parents would not have let me get away with even a 1/4 of what I see every single day. Next house - in a retirement community! Just kidding, DH, but perhaps we can be a bit more removed from elementary and junior highs next time??

In the hopes that part of my troubles lately were due to an old worn out futon mattress on our platform bed, DH finally drug me to a mattress store and we got a new mattress over the weekend. Our previous mattress of about 5 years was a no-foam innerspring which equals a recipe for disaster. Not only does the cotton compress a ton quickly, but it isn’t very effective at holding back the springs either.

Would you believe me if I said we brought the new QUEEN size mattress home in our JETTA? We decided to skip the springs this time and we decided foam was a necessary evil for a mattress with any sort of lifespan to it. So it came vacuum packed! We did indeed bring it home in the backseat of our Jetta no less! Go figure!

We picked a Dreamsleeper. It has something like 20 inches of foam and a few inches of cotton on either side of the foam, then they put it through machinery to compress it to the standard thickness and put the ties in, so you have that foam always trying to decompress to its original 20 inches of thickness, which means in theory that it won’t compress like most futon/platform bed mattresses. It even comes with a 10 year warranty on it.

We’ve spent two nights on it so far and I’m definitely making up much less sore. I still think the night on the guest bed while we let the new mattress decompress was a bit better. But, hopefully this new mattress will help me regain some of my missing energy. My creativity is back. Almost too good as I am feeling pulled in a hundred different directions and don’t know what to work on. But, there is a very small window where I feel like I have the energy to move forward on any of it. Of course it doesn’t help that every time I get myself all psyched up to work on something through the tiredness I’m missing some little piece that I need - not the right needle size or I don’t have the proper weight fusible interfacing or I do having the right sewing machine needle for that fabric etc. etc. And it is just enough too much to go out and obtain that missing something.

I did go to the doctor again yesterday. I have something systemic going on. All of this tiredness is not just in my head in the form of depression or otherwise. We’re opting first for my allergies being on hyperdrive. I’m getting patches of eczema in places and all the glands along my right side are swollen to painful levels - it hurts to bend my arm, to bend my legs and to sit upright because of swollen glands. If at the end of the week I’m not improved we’ll change the angle of attack. But, hopefully we get stuff fixed before too long. She said for now to give into an afternoon nap and be vigilant in taking the allergy meds and ibuprofen.

Wow, am I boring or what?!?!?!?

While I’m gone and not posting as often I have some places that you might enjoy…

Firstly, I was fortunate to win the sock yarn for being an early design submission designer to Sock Madness. The yarn won was from Scout’s Swag. I sent pictures and Scout and I corresponded a bunch and this is the gorgeous yarn she custom dyed for me! I’m afraid it is a one-off color. However, she was amazing to work with and I can’t recommend her enough if you want a custom colorway. Even if you don’t feel creative to come up with your own color scheme she has some pretty great colorways that you can order as well.

I also got some great sock yarn from Miss Lime and Miss Violet of the famous Lime ‘n Violet podcast. Etsy was giving me fits, but Miss V worked with me to get the colorway I wanted - Jubilation. Isn’t it just gorgeous!?!? It seems like it’ll be a great pair of socks for late winter knitting. They aren’t too falsely springy bright, but they remind me that spring is indeed on its way. Again, I have to say it was a pleasure to do business with Lime ‘n Violet.

Alas, I am a tad afraid that I won’t do either of these lovely yarns justice. But I know eventually I’ll get enough of fondling them and photographing them and will get out the needles. Plus, a few of these shots would also make great wallpaper for my computer so I can always enjoy them both in their skein form.

My post may be a tad late as some of my photos I took appear to have gotten corrupt either in the reading or transfer to the hard drive. I’m trying some recovery programs and hope to have a real post later in the day comlete with photos. If not, I’m afraid I will not have a 365 photo for the 17th :-(