Quickie...healthy stuff...

Just wanted to share this: for dinner tonight (well, Tuesday night...it's past midnight), I made salmon (broiled with a little olive oil, salt, pepper and dill) and a big panful of roasted veggies like Crazy Aunt Purl posted about a while back. Oh. My. Goodness. The veggies were wonderful! You can probably do it with any combination of hearty veggies -- I used two sweet potatoes, two red potatoes, one butternut squash, two big carrots, half a sweet onion and two cloves of garlic, tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. It was just SO GOOD, and with the salmon, it fit right in to one of my intentions for this year (see, I told you they'd crop up), which is to continue creating and eating healthy meals. It was also a very color coordinated meal...lots of yellows and oranges and that salmon-y pink color. Not a green thing in sight. LOL (Well, the dill....)

ETA: Now it's going on midnight again, and I can say this was one really healthy eating day! For breakfast I made myself some quinoa porridge, which I love but often forego in favor of something faster, like instant grits or a whole wheat bagel. The only thing I don't love about the porridge is that every damn time I make it, it boils over and makes a mess. It doesn't matter how closely I watch it, it does it. :::sigh::: Then I made another spinach-ricotta pie for my late lunch/early dinner today. Mmm. This stuff is awesome, and I've got leftovers for lunch for the next few days, too. 

It occurs to me now that I ate no meat today. I'm not a non-meat eater on a regular basis because, admittedly, I do love me some carnivorous fare, but I fully enjoy good-tasting meatless meals too. 

On top of this, I'm trying, once again, to add more fruits to my life. I am not good at eating fruit and I have no idea why. I love still-green bananas, and I love dried prunes (yes, I do!) and raisins (which I put in my grits, and that probably will make any number of southerners want to pass out), and in the summer I adore blueberries and good strawberries when I can find them. But the fruits available in the winter just don't really float my boat. (I know, you can still get strawberries and blueberries in the dead of winter in this day and age, but when possible, I try to avoid buying produce that had to be trucked thousands of miles to get to the store.) But I bought a crate of clementines the other day (yeah, I know, there goes my local produce thing, since they are a product of...some other country, I think?)...those I do enjoy. And I bought prunes. Might as well stick with what you know you like, right? 

What can I say?

No pictures today. Instead, I've spent all day, off and on, trying to compose a post about my intentions for this new year. What I ended up with was long and rambly and probably would only have been meaningful to me. Thus, I'm not posting it. I'm sure some of it will surface in subsequent posts over the course of the year, and probably within a more interesting context than me waxing at length in my obsessive, over-analytical, navel-gazing way.

That said, there was some spinning accomplished today. I've got one full bobbin of the Briar Rose BFL and nearly a second. I cannot wait to start plying this yarn! And plying will have to happen before I can spin anymore because I only have four bobbins. I've also realized that I need to attend to the maintenance of my little Traveller (a.k.a. Minnie) before much longer because all my spinning is making her shake and shimmy and things are definitely loose that should not be loose. Not good.

And there was some knitting today as well! Knitting has been scarce here since Minnie arrived. Need to find some balance on that front (but the spinning is so much fun!). I grabbed my Blackberry Jam sock to take with me today for some waiting-in-the-car knitting, and I think I got a whopping one round added to it. Tonight, however, I bit the bullet and ripped my mother-in-law's Sweetness sweater alllllll the way back to the ribbing and started reknitting it. :::sigh::: That is the more urgent project anyway, as we'll probably be celebrating her birthday this weekend and it would be good to have her gift done, you know?

And someone please tell me how tomorrow is Wednesday already???

And again...

Undulate is getting more attention! It was featured yesterday at One Pretty Thing. If you haven't visited the site before, please do! It's an incredibly fun site full of creative ideas (not just knitting) from all over cyberspace. Check it out!

And so a new year begins...

It's the first Monday of the new year, and that means Kevin went back to work and we went back to our school routine. In other words, things are (loosely) back to a post-holiday normal. Right? In theory, anyway.

My living room currently looks like this...

A stack of knitting books and magazines on the floor, after a friend came over on Saturday and I was helping her look for a pattern. Since they were out, I thought, "Wouldn't this be a good time to go through them and try and catalog patterns I'd like to make?" Right. So there they sit, because that is a larger job than it would seem, and this is only a small portion of my knitting library. It's overwhelming, but it bugs me that I have hundreds of patterns hidden in those pages and unless I go through them all, I forget they're there. 

And do you see the reflection in the TV? Yes, the tree. The tree is still up. I'm usually chomping at the bit to take it down, and that usually happens on New Year's Day. But this year, it didn't even phase me to leave it up. I'm kind of enjoying it still. (Getting the "slim" tree this year was definitely a very good choice! Had this been our old monster-sized tree, that baby would have been down days ago.) However, I'm realizing with the tree right in front of our living room window, it is monopolizing my biggest source for natural light at this point in the year, and it also occurred to me that the tree spot would be the perfect spot to sit with my spinning wheel in the mornings/early afternoons, especially on sunny days like today. So. The tree? She will be coming down soon. Possibly even today.

In the mean time, we've got handspun yarn to see...

This is my first attempt wheel-spun yarn from the Sanguine Gryphon batt. Here's another picture of it when it was hanging to dry...

(The colors are really a little more vivid, but I'm having editing issues. Sorry.) As you can see, it's a bit wonky...not at all consistent, but it was my first go, and I'm rather pleased with it. 

The Briar Rose BFL I'm spinning now appears to be turning out much more consistently...

I find the colors utterly fascinating. I mean, they were beautiful to begin with...

But then you spin them and they are beautiful in an appreciably different way. And then you ply, and they transform again! Seriously, folks...this is just like magic to me! LOL

Turning from spinning to knitting for a moment, I contemplate my mother-in-law's birthday sweater that I have screwed up in more ways than one. First, I am apparently an idiot because in doing the raglan decreases, I only did them on the sleeves, not the body, thus providing a neckline big enough for a two-headed person to fit through. (At last sight, my m-i-l only had one head, and I doubt she's grown another.)

Second, neckline aside, the sweater is too damn small. I was afraid it would be too boxy for her the way the pattern was written, so I did some waist shaping to bring it in a little, but now it fits my friend Peggy who is definitely smaller than my m-i-l.


ETA: Sweater pattern is Sweetness, by Theresa Vinson Stenersen, Knitty, Spring 2003

So, drat. Not only do I have to rip back my botched raglan section, I have to rip the whole freakin' sweater back down to the ribbing. Thankfully, this sweater knits up quickly in this Azteca yarn, so the reknit shouldn't be too painful.

(I'm blithely ignoring the little inkling I have that is saying that the sleeves may also be a touch too tight. I'm sure they'll be fine once they're seamed up. Really.)

Ouch.

So, for the past six weeks, I've been kickboxing. At least three times a week, and hour each day. Sweating my 42-year-old, out-of-shape arse off and working muscles that have flagrantly been sitting around eating metaphorical bonbons and watching soaps. And in six weeks? Nary an injury. Sore muscles, sure, and one strange foot pain that comes and goes, but other than that, I've gotten through unscathed.

Contrast: I've owned a spinning wheel since Friday morning. My lower back is tight. My middle back has a huge knot in it. My neck has a kink. My shoulders are aching. I have a headache. WTF?? C'mon! Seriously?? Punching and kicking I can handle, but treadling a wheel and drafting wool does me in? This hardly seems right. 

I'm loving the wheel, though, aches and pains notwithstanding. I gave up on what I will now officially term as "crap roving" that I bought when I first started with a drop spindle. Couldn't spin it on the spindle, couldn't spin it on the wheel, so the heck with it. It was cheap, and therein, I believe, lies the problem. I moved on to the remainder of the batt of Sanguine Gryphon merino/silk I started spindling a while back. (It's up in my blog banner, too.) Oh. My. God. It spun like a dream! The fiber is awesome. The spinner? Not so awesome. I'm still learning, to be sure. Plenty of inconsistencies in it...too thin parts and too thick parts and parts that are odd and blumpy (which I think should be a technical spinning term). But I did far better than I thought I'd be able to do, and I managed to ply about 107 yards of yarn today. (Pictures coming soon!)

Tonight I moved on to some roving I bought from Briar Rose Fibers not long ago. It is bluefaced leicester, and I'm starting to catch on to this whole "different fibers spin differently" thing. It took a little while to get into a comfortable groove with it because it definitely handles differently than the merino/silk blend, but once I got going, it went really well. I've got a LOT of this fiber, so it will take me a while (I think) to get through it all, but the colors are beautiful -- browns, greens, burgundies -- and I love to watch them as they spin together, and they'll be a whole other brand of happy once I get to plying them. 

Another thing I'm tickled about is that I'm spinning this fiber far finer than I ever, ever thought I'd be able to! My ultimate desire is to spin finer weight yarns...fingering and DK, maybe some worsted weight. I enjoy playing with chunky and thick & thin handspuns I buy occasionally (like the ones Cosy spins, which are always so pretty!), but that's not what I really want to spin. I know it's going to take a while to get consistent in my spinning, but I think I'm doing pretty well. 

Now if I can just avoid turning into a pretzel, I can continue to enjoy it all.

A new addition...

...to my fiber family...meet Minnie...

...which rhymes with "spinny," of course. :)

I've had it in my mind to buy a spinning wheel for a while, but I couldn't justify the expense. Occasionally, I'd check craigslist, but there were rarely any wheels listed in my area, and when they were, the ads were usually old enough that I'd missed the deal. Until now! I found this little Ashford Traveller listed there along with a whole host of weaving equipment (the listing was titled something about weaving and didn't mention the wheel, which is why I'm guessing I lucked out). It was still available when I inquired and for a price I couldn't pass up. I drove an hour yesterday to pick her up, and while she is definitely in need of a good cleaning and some TLC, she seems to work just fine, as far as I can tell. 

I've really never spun on a wheel before, so I'm just winging it, figuring it out by intuition as much as anything, but after having her home for an hour or so yesterday, I did manage this...

It's yarn! It sure isn't pretty yarn, but it has twist (way too much twist, frankly) and so I'm confident I've at least got the basic concept down. Refining will be a long work in progress, methinks. :} (Just for the record, things quickly deteriorated shortly after I took this picture, as I started getting large knots of overspun wool that would make any sheep cry in terror. Will try again today and hope for better results.)

Learning to spin more proficiently was one of my goals from last year, but I was only working with a drop spindle at that point. And while I did get better at it (which, srsly? There was no where to go but up for me with that skill! LOL), my ultimate goal was to get a wheel. And now I have one, so learning to spin with my wheel can now be a 2009 goal! 

I do wonder how much wool I'll have to sacrifice to the knot gods before I finally get the hang of this, though. Yikes. :}

Lime & Violet!

Well, this is an auspicious way to begin the new year! My Undulate scarf pattern is being featured today on Lime & Violet's The Daily Chum blog. Yeay! Thanks L & V!