Might start a Dr. Who scarf!

Crafty things

I have been busy with these things lately. Snow days do help with getting some of these projects done. I got a new Extra Fine Gauge Sock Loom from DaLooms and the first pix is of it inside the Knifty Knitter's smallest loom. Yep, that is really tiny.
Second and third pix are of a pair of booties that I hand knit with wool yarn and felted. The pattern I found was from craftzine website. Be nice if I could figure out how to put links in here. You just make a long strip in squares of color six colors long and then two squares off the side of the last square. Like a big L shape. Then a bit of folding and sewing and presto You have a slipper shape. Toss it in the washer for a while till it is the size you want. I actually put them back in the other day and got them a bit smaller than the pix shows as they were quite large enough to fit a size 9 or larger at that size and I am an 8 or so. Since they have a lot of stretch and give I wanted them a bit smaller. Had to really watch them tho. I really love them! They are sooooo cute and nice and snuggly warm. I do wear them with a pair of cotton socks as I am not sure that my easily irritated feet would tolerate the wool. Better to be safe and it is warmer that way. Old Farm house floors without finished basement under them are COLD. In the kitchen I keep my case of pop on the floor in the winter and it keeps my pop chilled to the temp I like. Cold but not frozen. So something on the feet is Necessary!

Update

Haven't updated this blog for quite a while. Snowed in again today. Lots of SNOW! Well, not as much as the East coast got but our accumulation is as much at around 55 inches of snow. It's not been melting either this year. So when these huge piles start melting it is gonna be a MESS. I do not look forward to that either! Especially to coming home to the dog as a mud ball from head to toe, and having to drag him into the tub and scrub him off so the house and us do not end up looking the same. Yep the snow is almost to the top of those 4 foot fences! This is not the shoveled stuff either. Whoppo just loves to go diving into the drifts. Right after this photo he fell into the drift a bit behind him. There is a crust on the lower level of the drifts where it rained and froze the snow underneath so it is easier for him to walk on top of the drifts.
The other picture was driving to work a couple weeks ago. Hmmm, real fun huh??? Not! white knuckles all the way. A good year to spend the winter at home if you ask me. Nobody else seems to like that idea tho. Everyone still wants their dogs groomed. I look at roads like those and want to say cut em yourself and I'll fix em in the spring for you. hmmm, that doesn't seem to go over.

Tour de France

Ok, I dropped out of the tour. Fell off I did! Not enough stamina I guess and then all those distractions along the way. I did get 1 and 1/2 bobbins of flax spun. I will wheel on as I can.

New Baby!

Here's the new Baby for this year.. A Filly Keeping with our weather theme for names Rod declared her "Tornado". She has a medicine hat and may keep most of the color on that. She is also sporting a shield on her chest! Born yesterday 7/28/09. Heheh I use this blog as a record to remember facts sometimes. That looks like her sister Lighting over on the right side of the picture. Mom's name is Cheyenne and the parents are registered on the Spanish Mustang Registry. Dad is pure white with one blue eye.

Tour de Fleece update

Well did not work on my tour this weekend. Am getting addicted to Farm Town on Facebook. I spend tons of time on that instead. Also Doing the Sunshine Ranch game. Maybe highspeed internet was not such a great idea to get more time. I just get into more things faster.
I did get the dye powders I got from Dori transferred to jars. At least some of each one. She sent an over abundance of each color. 15 colors! Now my porch and almost every thing on it is colored with tiny-to-large splotches of colors, mostly the turquise and one of the pinks. Interesting. At least the porch was in need of painting anyway so not a big issue. It does not come through well in pictures so no pix.

Tour De Fleece

Well I changed my mind about making it a murled yarn. I am going to spin and ply the colors seperately. I think I am going to use it for warp for some bookmarks for a weaving bookmark exchange. Gonna do a linen warp and woolen weft. Then it will be Linsey-woolsey! So keeping the colors distinct would be more helpful.

Tour de Fleece

I got started on my Tour de Fleece challenge on Sunday. After spending the day Saturday finishing what was on the old wheel I decided not to use that wheel as it is acting real putzy. So I got out a couple bobbins for the Mazurka and started with the natural colored flax that I found. It weighted 3.5 oz. then I will spin the bleached Irish flax (linen), which weighted 3.7 oz., and ply the two together for strength, which they say you don't need too but I want to use it for warp and not to sure of the evenness of my spinning. Some pretty thin spots there. Will work on it being more consistant but I like some variance so I am not too concerned. I love the tweady, barber pole effect of plying two different colors together too. Gives a lot more interest to the yarn. I think I will aim for a Linsey-Woolsy fabric. Traditionally that is Linen warp and wool weft. I got plenty of yarn around to use for the weft.

Le Tour de Fleece

I have Joined the Tour De Fleece
Rules are to set yourself a challenge that has to do with spinning. Can be almost anything this year to be completed between July 4th and July 26th. Mostly working along the times that the Tour De France race is running.
I have chosen as my project to locate and spin up some linen rovings that I have had for some time. I think they are around here somewhere so as soon as I find them and get the other project off the spinning wheel I will begin on my challenge. I can begin tomorrow by finding the rovings. I have never spun linen before so this will be a new thing also.

Old negatives

This is the coolest thing to do. I have a whole bunch of these old negatives from the 1940's into the 1960's. Most are outsized for modern photo printing equipment, so it is somewhat expensive to have them individually done at around $2.50 or more per negative. With over a hundred negatives and more curiousity than finances I am searching for ways to see these without it costing me a whole lot of $$. So this is the way I found this out. I called a local photographer who suggested putting them on a light box and photographing them with a digital camera. Find a photo program that will change positives to negatives and use that as it will do the reverse on a negative. Well I took the photo chip to the local photo place and they pulled the neg pix from the camera card and played with their program till they stumbled on the Way to Do It. Well in looking around in our programs for photos I found that I could do this myself. We have a Nero photo essentials program that will do this.

Some of the things that I have found out in doing this: No flash on the camera. Set your camera to text or museum or flower. Play around till you get the result that you want. You are going to have odd ghosts of things show up in the finished item this is not a perfect solution just cheap. If you really need perfect take it to the photo place and pay the $$. I also had to turn all the lights out in the room I was doing this in as any extra light caused more "Ghost" things to show up. Don't worry you can adjust a lot of the dark and light issues with most programs. Relax and have fun with it. Try not to loose your negatives always showing them off. I lost my first batch as I showed them to anyone who would be patient and kind enough to look. I lost em somewhere so I only have the pictures of the negatives that are on my camera card. Guard those negatives! Turn off the automatic dating of the pictures! You can crop it out but you loose some of the picture doing that!

Above picture was originally taken at Christmas 1952 by my Father. That is my Mother and my older sister looking over my older brother's shoulder to see what he got for Christmas and me over in the corner doing my own thing as usual. I can tell when this photo was taken by content and me being a baby. I was born in June of 1952.