Fiber Fool

It has been nuts around here. Recuperating and reacting poorly to the meds (nausea) while also trying to put together a last minute design on a tight schedule. Taking on two more commissions - yes the book was well received. Received so well they want a second like it for the interior designer as well as two books for the next house too!

Needless to say, it might be a bit before I get caught up on all my blog reading and replies to comments… Or make progress on Sahara… *sigh*

I’m definitely improving. The thought of leaving the house doesn’t seem like a daunting task. Though going up and down the basement stairs still leaves me a bit short of breath. But definitely improving.

But there isn’t much to report on here :-/

If you do not read the SOAR blog but have read Spin-Off Magazine I urge you to take just a few minutes and fill out a reader survey. They are coming up on their 30th anniversary and are seeking feedback from readers - subscribers or not. Please help spread the word about this survey as it is only open until May 1!

Also, check out this pair of Two Thumbs Up from Bookgrump. She kindly sought permission to put them in her school’s auction to raise money for a defibrillator. I hope they do well for her! And yes, I know my patterns say items knit from them are not for sale with out consent, but I do usually give my consent if you just ask!

I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive the darkness of the photo above. It has been grey and dark and damp - prefect sick weather. The flash was required to not get a blurry photos. Thanks to my sister there are no “hot spots” (more on that later). Some progress was made yesterday. I wound my handspun into a yarn cake! And, I knit…

I’m afraid this is all I can show you at the moment. While the gauge is nowhere near what I was hoping for the overall look of the knit fabric is exactly what I was hoping for when I prepped the fiber - slight undulations of value creating subtle striping! Yeah!

Thanks for all your well wishes. I think those (and some meds after a trip to the doctor yesterday) are working wonders and I’m feeling a bit improved. If nothing else, my head is much better knowing that I had not yet developed bronchitis as I had feared. My progress was aided in part by ABC. Yes, I’m a tad of a TV junkie. I like noise in the background when I doing stuff. If you didn’t know it - ABC has their television shows available for free viewing on their web site. In most cases the last four weeks of episodes shown (even the reruns) are available and the quality is quite remarkable. There are three or four 30 second commercial breaks (which I often use to check on e-mail). I caught up on last weeks shows yesterday from the comfort of bed rather than having to head to the basement to watch them.

Back to how my sister has improved my photography… By fantastic birthday shopping of course! Man it is great to have family that is more clued into one of your hobbies than you are for a change! On Friday a bit of a banged up package arrived from Adorama containing a wide variety of camera accessories. My favorite so far is the flash diffuser for the built-in flash. It slips into the hot shoe and forms a tent over the pop-up flash and then hooks over the name plate of the camera. It works miracles! It is still flash photography from a built-in flash, but it is so much softer with no hot spots. In fact, yesterday’s photo DH took with that in place as well. She also sent some anti-fog cloths from Nikon, an LCD screen shade, a set of three lens cap wranglers, a reference card for the D-80, and a table top Manfrotto tri-pod. Amber did all the hard work and mom pitched in for part of it. It was a fantastic package and kind of made up for the fact that the end of birthday week was spent in bed with a fever and cough.

I’ll leave you with a soft focus of the yarn cake in natural light just because despite the slight blurriness I think it is beautiful…

Photo by Drew

It seems I put the commission book to bed and came down sick. Well, actually I was sick while wrapping it up. I got ill on Thursday and am still trying to hack up a lung (or three - yes, I’m coughing that much). I’ve got a deadline fast approaching and was trying to work anyway. Can one design through osmosis? With a fever? No real progress has taken place just yet aside from being extremely wishy-washy about what I want to do.

Anyway, I’m afraid that since I’ve been down there is really no blog fodder at this point. The wheel has not been touched. Knitting needles have only been thought about. DH sewed on a button yesterday, but I’m afraid that is all the closer I’ve come to sewing. There has been some reading and I took some time to update my reading lists which were woefully behind (if you’re curious click the “Links” in the header and scroll down to 2007 Books Read).

This is killing me because there are so many things I *want* to be doing - I want to be Navajo Plying my singles from last week now that they’ve rested, I want to knit my design, I want to do some dyeing, I want to work on Sahara more, I want to frog that damn Lorna’s Laces sock…

In honor of Earth Day and spring, just a couple more shots from the CSU campus last weekend…