Fiber Fool

As I had mentioned last Friday, my generous (and talented) sister of AMS Photography took portraits of Drew and I together. These are our first decent portraits together, ever! We didn’t bother with engagement photos and we went cheap on the wedding photographer who ended up not having the proper equipment to deal with our ceremony location so all of our “together” shots post-wedding are disembodied faces. Amber kindly remedied the situation for us while she was here.

Of course the hardest part is choosing what to print. Originally I thought just a couple of copies of one of the more traditional portrait shots for parents/grandparents. But after living with them for a week and doing my own post-processing on her raw images I’m starting to like more and more of them and am also contemplating a mosaic of the artier shots she took for our own wall somewhere. They seem a little less egotistical than a traditional portrait and it would be fantastic to have some of Amber’s art on our walls along with all of Drew’s family’s art…

But, I still have to choose what to print and frame as gifts. I figure mother’s day is coming up before too long so it would be a nice surprise to pop in the mail. Oh, the decisions! Feel free to ring in on your favorite!

This morning I ran soaker hoses for the garden and picked basil for pesto dinner tonight. I even went to the grocery store for some supplies to make dinner a bit healthier. The garden chores are always more fun with bright orange shoes and an orange herb cutter! :-)

I also inventoried worsted weight wools and some odds and ends that didn’t get sorted in the great haul out. I’m about out of cubes. I may have one or two left. Or, those two may become one for odds and end scrap yarns and one for undyed blank yarns… I haven’t decided yet.

Either way, my fiber stash isn’t going to fit in the tower of cubes. I’m pretty sure that will hold true even if I pull out sweater quantities of yarn from the other bins and put them in the zipper bags from linen purchases. So, anyone have brilliant ideas for fiber storage? I could stack a few more of the bins (assuming they have any left at the store) below my egress window between the towers and the desk. Though I was kind of hoping for a short bookshelf to fit there… I suppose I could maybe do some sort of flat-topped trunk and then have some books on top of that with bookends? It isn’t like I dig in my fiber stash that frequently. Any other great ideas??

Well, swapping out the cable modem didn’t fix our issue at all. That said, I was rather impressed with our service. We called after noon on Saturday to schedule for a technician to come out. I expected at that point we’d have to wait until Monday to get things fixed, but within about 4 hours we had a tech at the house trying to track down the problem. It ended up the outdoor connections just needed reseated and we were back in business - go figure.

But, I’ve remained absent for a good reason… We have one cable outlet in the entire house. It is in my studio (a pseudo spare room in the corner of the basement). It is in the yarn corner of my studio. My studio is the junk drawer of out house - someone is coming over at the last minute? Just shove it in the studio. So, in order for that tech to come out the studio needed exhumed. So, I got out bankers boxes and boxed up yarn accroding to fiber content and weight and put index cards on top so if I didn’t get stuff unboxed quickly I could still find what i needed. That said, uncovering carpet that hasn’t seen the light of day in who knows how long has energized me to get that room clean and functional once again. So, that is where I have been since the last post.

I got myself some collapsable cubes that fit inside my towers of metal cubes and I’ve been sorting and inventorying my stash. I got rid of two huge bags of yarn yesterday - mostly box store yarns with high acrylic content. They went to good homes so I feel good about that. I have all my fingering and sport weight yarns in 3 (out of 10) cubes and inventoried! This morning I need to sort the cottons as a friend is stopping by to see if she wants any of the cottons I wish to get rid of. What she doesn’t take will go to the same group the acrylic stuff went to next week.

On that note, I need to get sorting. With the busy summer and now this organizational binge I’m finding Plurk’s micro-blogging format to be much easier to squeeze in here and there. So head over there and look me up if you’re going through withdrawl ;-)

Oh, and I’m totally open to suggestions and tips on stash organization! My biggest question at the moment is how I want to deal with my circular needles. In a lot of cases I’m guessing I no longer have the original packaging.

Well, I was planning on releasing a pattern on Wednesday (Tuesday afternoon on Ravelry), however something is messed up with my storekeeper privileges over there and I am currently unable to upload PDF files. Seeing as how this week is TNNA and Knitter’s Connection and the people who can help me at Ravelry are attending those two things I’m unable to release the pattern. Some of you may have aleady seen it on Ravelry. I’ll be sure to make a post here on the blog when it is actually purchasable, so stay tuned.

In the meantime that means I once again have little to blog about. So, it seemed the perfect opportunity to take part in the Flick Mosaic Meme that is going around…

One of those is even my own photo! In fact, I have a few where my photos appeared on the first page. If you are even slower than I and haven’t seen the meme yet, here is the low down…

The Concept:
a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

I was pretty literal with everything. For the high school I had to leave “high school” off to get any hits and for the flikr name I left off the number portion. Of course my answers to a lot of these questions change rather frequently, but these represent my answers as of this morning.

At the end of last week my cell phone spontaneously deleted the address book overnight. In an effort to restore all my phone numbers I launched iSync figuring it would be that easy to get all the numbers back in my phone. I was wrong. Instead, it deleted all of my numbers in Address Book as well. It retained contact names but I lost pretty much everything else.

If I got your contact since August or got updates to your contact info since August, please e-mail me (fiberfool at gmail) with your info so I can get it corrected in my address book.

On the plus side of this I took the phone into our local storefront and had good service. They couldn’t do anything, but they did say it was grounds for calling the phone number to get the phone replaced under warranty. I called Friday morning and my replacement arrived on Tuesday without paying the extra for a quick turn around. I am now mostly moved into the new handset aside from rebuilding my contact list.