Just finished spinning my first skein of yarn for the new shawl...

...and my, is it lovely.

It's a blend of black satin angora, white bombyx silk, and 15-micron merino wool (gray). A nice, lustrous pewter gray with just enough color variation to be interesting, and obscenely soft. It has a nice soft angora halo to it--a little spikier than regular angora, but still very nice. I can't wait to start knitting with it. :-)

Oh, and did I mention? The entire 225-yard skein weighs less than two sheets of paper. :-)

At this rate, an entire 1800-yard shawl (which is a pretty good size) would weigh only 2.75 ounces. Not bad, eh? It's the finest I've spun yet. (10,200 yards per pound, for those interested in such things.)

But I'm more happy over the quality of the yarn--it is more softly spun/airier than what I did for the spiral shawl, and it's also more evenly spun. I've been spinning this woolen-style (long draw), so I'm especially pleased at having managed to keep the yarn diameter even. This has been a much more technically difficult yarn than that for the spiral shawl, and I'm quite happy with it.

(By the way, people say it's hard to spin superfine yarns. It actually isn't. It's just a matter of getting used to it...the easiest yarn is whatever you normally spin. For me, it's much easier to spin superfine than it is to spin sweater-weight--my fingers naturally gravitate towards superfine since I spin that way normally.)

Now it's a matter of sitting down and working out the pattern I want to knit...I have an idea of what I want, but need to sit down and have a conversation with the yarn, to see what it wants. No sense in arguing with your materials. ;-)

Lots more, but I'll have to write it later; tomorrow morning I meet with my career coach, and then have Yet Another Interview at Openwave in the afternoon. Tomorrow is a second-round interview with Ofoto--wish me luck!!

Tien

The road goes ever on and on...

...I got hijacked last Sunday.

There I was, minding my own business, heading down to the pet store to get cat litter. Next thing I knew, I was on the freeway south to, um, well, wherever.

"Uh, weren't we supposed to get cat litter?"
"Yeah. So what? We can get it in Santa Cruz."
"Um, where exactly are we going?"
"I have no idea. Where did you want to go?"
"I wanted to go to the pet store! For cat litter!"
"Yeah, yeah, we've been through all that, OK?"

So I figured what the hell, I had the California guidebook in the car, I could get wherever I was going and then figure out where to go from there.

Then I realized I didn't have the California guidebook in the car.

But what the hell.

So I went down to Santa Cruz, which of course meant stopping by The Golden Fleece (yarn shop) and Donnelly Chocolates (sex toy, er, I mean chocolate shop). The Golden Fleece had Suri Elegance, a nice laceweight alpaca, on sale for 30% off, so I bought two skeins of a nice deep amber color.

And then it was back onto the freeway, taking the 1 South (aka the Pacific Coast Highway). It's a beautiful freeway, as you'd imagine, running down the coast with terrific views. But I wasn't thinking of much of anything, just heading south until I found something interesting (maybe Monterey) or got tired of driving. I had no idea where I was going, but figured there was probably something interesting going on somewhere.

Eventually, I noticed the signs saying "Monterey", and then the sign saying "Monterey County Fairgrounds". I figured, hmm, there's usually something going on at the fairgrounds on any particular day, so I followed the signs to the fairgrounds.

It turned out there were two things going on at the fairgrounds that day: the local Fancy Fowl (or was that Fowl Fanciers?) club was having a show, and there was an "Indian Art" exhibition. I started off with the Fancy Fowl, since it was free, and man, there were some weird chickens there! There were furry chickens ("silkies"), stained-glass chickens (with a black border around each feather--very beautiful), poofy-headed chickens ("crested"), chickens with feather mops attached to their feet ("feathered feet"), and the crowning glory of the show, the poodle chicken.

At least, it looked like a poodle.

Head a poof of feathers, body a poof of feathers (like a feather-duster!), tail a powder-poof of feathers, and two big poofs of feathers that might or might not have contained feet and legs. There were so many feathers around the head I don't think the poor thing could see at all...but dang, it was...umm...poodle-like!

I hereby christen it a poodle chicken.

Moving along, the other show was also pretty interesting. I ponied up $4.50 for the entry fee, and discovered, to my surprise, that it was not an India-Indian show, but a Native American/First Peoples art show. There were the inevitable rattlesnake heads, of course, and some rather nice beadwork, rugs, and basketweaving--all of which went over my head, since I don't really like any of those--and then there were a few places that had obsidian knives. Which were really cool--chipped out of obsidian and then lashed to an antler haft, very primitive-looking but also very craftsmanlike. So I went for a closer look.

It turns out that not all obsidian knives are created equal. These days, people generally saw a flat piece off a chunk of obsidian, then knap it (take flakes off) by hand to make it look entirely hand-knapped. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I did notice that the lesser-quality knives tended to have flat blades--saw a thin slice, take off just enough to make it look hand-made, and you're done. The lesser-quality knives also had big pieces taken off--like chips half an inch or more in width--where the better knives had much finer work, chips spaced 1/4" or less apart. It was interesting to look at--I know virtually nothing about obsidian knives, but good craftsmanship always shows.

The tour de force of the obsidian knives, though, was this GORGEOUS piece of work about 3" long, with a leaf-shaped blade. It was knapped very evenly, and shaped from edge to edge--thickest in the center and tapering on both sides (all the other knives I'd seen were flat-bladed, as they were sawn)--and that was nice. But, the genius of this blade was that there was a diamond-shaped inclusion (darker spot) in the obsidian, and the maker had seen this and carefully placed it so the diamond went precisely from edge to edge on the blade! so, if you held it up to the light, you saw a darker diamond in the center of the blade. It was stunning.

That said, it was also $325, and had what I considered to be an unpleasantly beaded antler handle (I really am not into Native American beading), so I passed on it, but asked the vendor to please let me know if he got any other knives of that quality but with a plain antler handle. I'm fond of knives, and those were truly beautifully done.

After that I wound up at the Monterey Aquarium, which was remarkable and amazing, but as plenty of other places have written about it, I won't.

All of which got me in the mood to go on a road trip, so when I remembered that the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve was blooming, in one of the best blooms this century...well, that's a later story.

:-)

Tien

playing with your food

Oh, lordy lordy.

I can't claim complete innocence, I ignored the ominously thumpy noises and the cat-scrabbling-across-the-floor scratchings from the living room as Isis downed her second rat in my bedroom. I should have known.

But now it's happened. Oh, woe is me.

So, now the last 1/3 of Isis's dinner is on the loose somewhere in the living room, with the Fuzz, incompetent-yet-aspiring Mighty Hunter that he is, skidding around trying to catch it and mostly demonstrating that he wouldn't survive a minute in a world without canned cat food. (He actually has been known to catch prey from time to time, but only the most challenging and difficult prey, like moths and beetles.)

The good news is that Sweetheart, despite her small stature, is indeed a Mighty Huntress (She-Who-Brings-Down-Squirrels), and the odds of the rat remaining loose for more than, say, overnight are pretty low, once Her Royal Highness works out that it's there.

The bad news is that, unless I want half a rat on my bathroom floor in the morning, I have to find the damn thing NOW.

So, as you go about your nice, quiet, day-to-day lives, think of me as I go crawling around the living room with a flashlight, chasing a rat, assisted by an enthusiastic and thoroughly incompetent cat.

Oh, woe is me.

Tien

more road-tripping?

I am rapidly becoming fascinated with one little fact: a ticket from San Francisco to Costa Rica is only $252, round-trip.

Isn't that utterly...fascinating?

And I do still have one blank page left on my passport...

Hmm.

$252.

Costa Rica.

Hmm.

Tien

Going exploring: road trip, craftwork, and career coaches

So, it's spring, the weather is beautiful, and I'm out of work, or more likely on vacation until recalled. Meanwhile, of course, I'm free as the air, and the world is full of possibility. Could there be any better time for a road trip?

I don't plan on an extended road trip (though I'd love one), as I have to be more or less in the area for interviews, but there's lots to see within a 200-mile radius of San Francisco. In fact, there's lots to see almost anywhere, if you're just willing to look; but that's another matter.

The rules for exploring, as opposed to touring, are pretty simple: you choose a byway, you get in the car, and you start exploring. Along the way, you may discover little cabins by the wayside, make a detour to Great America, or whatever else you may find...but you may not intend to go somewhere, as in "I'll drive down to Santa Cruz, have lunch in the Crow's Nest, hang out on the Boardwalk, go walking at Natural Bridges, and then go down to the Monterey Aquarium." That's not exploring, that's touring.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with touring, but I've always felt it was uncomfortably close to working--fit in these elements one after another, boom boom boom boom boom. The wonder of exploring is the spontaneity--getting lost, finding something interesting and spending hours or days engaged with it without looking at the clock. It's not that different from creative craftwork--going down a byway and exploring what happens if. Eventually, of course, you wind up somewhere, and if you're lucky it's an interesting somewhere--but exploration has always struck me as much more fun than touring. This is one of the reasons I don't believe in following patterns. To me, following patterns gets you to your destination, but you miss the many fascinating possibilities along the way.

An excerpt from The Phantom Tollbooth, as Milo and Alec enter the (invisible) city of Reality:

"It's really a very pleasant city," said Alec as he strolled down the street, pointing out several of the sights, which didn't seem to be there, and tipping his cap to the passers-by. There were great crowds of people rushing along with their heads down, and they all appeared to know exactly where they were going as they darted down and around the nonexistent streets and in and out of the missing buildings.

"I don't see any city," said Milo very softly.

"Neither do they," Alec remarked sadly, "but it hardly matters, for they don't miss it at all."

[...]

...Everyone knew that the most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what's in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that. Then one day someone discovered that if you walked as fast as possible and looked at nothing but your shoes you would arrive at your destination much more quickly. Soon everyone was doing it. They all rushed down the avenues and hurried along the boulevards seeing nothing of the wonders and beauties of their city as they went.

No one paid any attention to how things looked, and as they moved faster and faster everything grew uglier and dirtier, and as everything grew uglier and dirtier they moved faster and faster, and at last a very strange thing began to happen. Because nobody cared, the city slowly began to disappear. Day by day the buildings grew fainter and fainter, and the streets faded away, until at last it was entirely invisible. There was nothing to see at all.

So, and so: there's something to be said for being purposeful--as they say, if you walk as fast as you can and look only at your shoes, you get there faster--but you miss a lot along the way.

I'm of mixed opinion about travel. My housemate is going off for a week in Thailand sometime in the next few months, and asked me what she should see. Well, with only a week in Thailand, she doesn't really have time to explore...so she's spending a day in Bangkok, flying to Chiang Mai for two days, flying to Angkor Wat (in Cambodia) for a day touring the ruins, and then hitting one or two more sites before flying back. A perfectly logical itinerary for someone who's only got a week to see everything, but...

...something in me just cries out against that kind of one-two-three travel. I'd rather take two weeks and explore a little bit of Costa Rica--going out, wandering to towns, taking the bus, and enjoying the slow time of Third World travel--and see less, than spend two weeks hopping on planes and "seeing" the "best" spots, one after another. I think I'd see less and experience more.

But, that's me. And I have to admit, if I had only a week to see Southeast Asia, I'd be hard-pressed not to do the same thing. But I think it's missing something.

Along those lines, I'm going to see a career coach on Monday...and going in for career counseling, since Openwave's paying for it. I feel like I'm stagnating--my occupation (project management) really isn't challenging me anymore, and I see very little point focusing on my destination, the top of the ladder, when I really don't care what's there. so I'm talking to a career coach to see if we can find a direction that's better for me--where I can enjoy the journey rather than constantly looking at the destination. I think there are some obvious directions for us to go, but, well...we'll see on Monday.

I'm going to put together a c.v. for him this weekend, just to give him the idea of the twists and turns of my life so far. I imagine it should be quite interesting (she said wickedly).

Tomorrow I am also going off (perhaps to explore the city?) with my Tibetan friend, who was the one who guided me around Dharamsala. She got to the U.S. about a year ago, and is working as a live-in assistant to an elderly mother-daughter couple. It's been pretty interesting listening to her perspective on the U.S.--it's funny, because it's almost exactly like listening to all the stuff I thought was weird about India.

Tien

Update on Isis, and laceweight yarns

Just thought I'd drop in a note saying that Isis is much better. I've been keeping her warm, and humidifying her cage with an ultrasonic mister, and giving her a humid hide-box filled with sphagnum moss, to help with the bronchitis, and have been putting antibiotic ointment on the eye to help it. She went to the vet yesterday, and they took another culture from her--it won't come back until late next week, but the vet thinks there's a good chance that she's managed to kick this Pseudomonas infection (I hope so!).

The vet also looked at her right eye (which had a nasty ulcer) and says it's massively improved! It's not all better yet, and the vet thinks she still might lose the eye, but she's got a fighting chance, and that's all that can be really asked for.

(Last time, the vet said she would almost certainly lose the eye, and the challenge was to keep it from becoming a dangerous abcess.)

Oh, and the vet said she was absolutely beautiful, and everyone in the veterinary was crowding in to admire her when the vet was examining/working with her. :-) She really is quite the beauty. And sweet-tempered, too.

Someone asked me whether I sell my handspun laceweight yarns. (I apologize for not emailing you back; there didn't seem to be an email address.) Unfortunately, no, I don't--actually I've often wished I could hire someone else to do it for me!! I can only spin about 15 yards of two-ply per hour, so it's very, very slow going. The main reason I haven't tried hiring someone is that I did the math--15 yards per hour means 100 hours' work to spin 1500 yards, so at $10/hour it would be $1000 to have someone else spin the yarn for my shawls! Of course, they might be able to spin faster (I spin on drop spindles, which are slower), but still, it would be extremely expensive. So I don't.

On the other hand, I do know where you can get good laceweight yarns. Carolina Homespun ( http://www.carolinahomespun.com ) has a fantastic baby alpaca laceweight yarn, very soft and very fine. If I hadn't already been committed to this project, I would have bought some to knit with, it's that beautiful. I've also seen Suri Elegance at other shops, which is a fine, silky yarn from suri alpacas--the only downside is that it's obscenely expensive (I saw it at $66 for about 400-500 yards). The baby alpaca is much cheaper.

Tien

Thinking of making a drum carder

After ruining the first skein of laceweight by thwapping it around too hard (resulting in unpleasant little nubs where the angora "slipped loose" of the cashmere/silk blend), I've been leaning towards blending fibers together before spinning. If it were just the silk/wool, I'd be set--I have a pair of mini-combs, and I'm not afraid to use them. :-) But the angora has a fairly short staple, so blending them on combs has been difficult to impossible. If I want to blend them together, it will have to be on hand cards. And I've never managed to use hand cards successfully.

On the other hand, I *did* just get laid off, so I probably shouldn't run out and buy that $300 drum carder ($370 by the time you add on the brush attachment and shipping)--and I don't really have space for it, I'd only use it a couple times a year (if that), and even the Petite makes a much bigger batt than I want/need. Five or six ounces of fiber will do me for a year and a half, so getting a drum carder is absurd.

So, over the last few days, I spent some time thinking about the problem I had on the hand cards (fibers doubling back over onto themselves) and how a drum carder differs from hand cards. Then I started trying to duplicate the drum carder method on hand cards.

A drum carder works by having fiber picked up by a small drum and slowly transferred to a large drum. The secret is that the big drum rotates much faster than the small drum, so as the fibers come in contact with the large drum, they're drawn off into a thin layer on the big drum, rather than staying as a giant wad of fiber. The small drum does two things: (1) it moves the fiber into contact with the big drum, and (2) it holds the fiber back, ever so slightly, so it tends to straighten as it winds onto the big drum. This tends to align the fibers so they lie mostly parallel.

Hand cards work in a somewhat similar way, with the top card picking up fiber from the bottom card, and the slight friction tending to straighten the fibers. However, there are two problems with hand cards that tend to result in fibers doubling back on themselves. The first is that, unlike in the drum carder, there is a good chance of picking up the fibers in the center or the far end when using hand cards. This is both because hands don't have the precision of drum carder alignment ("you should just be able to fit a business card between the two drums"--that's precise) and because the fibers in the top card often get caught back on the bottom card, which usually doubles them over.

The second problem is that hand cards aren't continuous; it's very hard to avoid loose fibers at top and bottom. These tend to get caught during the carding stroke, again producing doubled-over fibers. A drum carder doesn't have this problem, for three reasons:

(1) the fibers are much better-embedded into the carding cloth after a pass on a drum carder (probably because the big drum rotates so much faster than the small drum),
(2) loose fibers get picked up by the small drum, rotated around, and redeposited on the big drum (instead of getting doubled over at the edge of hand cards)
(3) the carding cloth is continuous, meaning there are no edges to produce doubled fibers.

I've played around with various ways of using hand cards, including using the equivalent of a brush attachment: stroking the hand card with a brush between passes to push the fiber lightly into the carder. This works a lot better than conventional carding, but I still wasn't really satisfied with the results...

...so I'm thinking of making a small drum carder to my own specifications. Or rather, a blending carder, which would just be one drum covered with carding cloth, equipped with a brush. I had thought about making a full carder with two drums, but since I'm working mainly with prepared fibers (combed bombyx, combed merino, and partially-combed angora), I think I can get away with just one. I'm blending, not carding.

The nice part about making my own would be getting a smaller carder that's easier to store and handle. I figure a carder with a 4" wide, 6" diameter drum would be much better for my purposes than a bigger one (even the Petite)--I can do an experimental batt with much less fiber (important because I work with expensive and hard-to-find fibers), and I don't want or need big batts because I spin very, very fine.

So I am seriously thinking about making an experimental drum of my own. It won't be super-cheap, but a 6" diameter drum requires about 20" of carding cloth. At $5.75/inch, that's a bit over $100, but since carding cloth runs 8" wide, if I cut it in half, I'd only need $57 worth of carding cloth. That's a lot cheaper than $374 for a Fricke Petite.

Of course, then I get the fun of trying to build my own drum carder with brush attachment. I'm still considering what I'd do for a cylinder, but am leaning towards some kind of hard foam--I can cast my own if I need to. If I can get an axle centered, then I have the basic part of the drum carder. From there, it's just a matter of putting together the bearings and adding a crank to it. I think it's probably possible to replace the flyer on my electric spinner (temporarily) with the little drum carder, which would save me lots of space, too.

The only question is whether it will work, and of course I won't find that out until I can get some carding cloth. So I'll probably order some on Monday.

I figure there's about a 50-50 chance that it will actually work as intended, but if it does, it'll be a lot cheaper and better than a full-size drum carder. If it doesn't, then I'll have learned a bit more about how carders work, and about how to design/build random tools, and what the heck, at least I'll have been entertained for a few days. Since I've got some time off, that sounds like a good thing.

Meanwhile, today I'm going to work on turning one of my acrylic spindle whorls into an Akha-style spindle, since I'm trading it for some satin angora. It's a very pretty whorl, crystal-clear acrylic with blue glitter on the outside, transparent hot pink seed beeds in the center, and a ring of silver beads along the outside to rim-weight it. It is unfortunately a bit too heavy for its size, but it will make a very pretty spindle nonetheless. Acrylic spindle whorls are tremendously fun--if you haven't tried making them, you should. Mix the acrylic with the hardener, pour into molds, wait twenty minutes for the first layer to set, drop in your decorations, and fill the rest of the way. It's like making candles with "treasures" embedded in them--and the results are beautiful.

Anyway, it's also a beautiful day out, so I may go walking, too.

Tien

Well, I have once again joined the ranks of the unemployed...

...I got laid off today.

Not unexpected, since they'd moved the entire group off to Seattle, the UK, and India, leaving me nothing to do for the last month. It's been terribly demoralizing being paid to stare at the wall eight hours a day--I would far, FAR rather be paid to do something productive than be paid for doing nothing. And I was already looking at other positions. So at least that part is over.

The three good parts:

(1) I have a very good chance of being placed in the organization. For the next two weeks, I'm still on the payroll, so I have the chance to transfer to another group. I have solid support from some very well-respected people, so my chances are about as good as they can get. I've already had one very encouraging preliminary interview. So the chances of my being "re-hired" are very, very good.

(2) The severance package from this company is very, very good. (Insanely good, in fact.) After having worked there for four months, I get nine weeks of severance pay PLUS two weeks on the payroll (during which I don't have to work)--so if you add it up, I get eleven weeks of severance pay--after only working four months. Wow. Hurt me, baby.

So, I am once again job-hunting, but with far better prospects this time. And with enough money (with unemployment) to carry me through the next ten months, if I need that long to find a job. So I am really cheerful.

What was really great was finding out how many people in the organization like me, and are willing to stand up for me. I think at least 3-4 people must have gone to speak to the VP about me yesterday--spontaneously, without my asking them to. And he is very, very supportive, and very proactive, about helping me find other positions in the company. It's really nice knowing so many people think well of me--I really hadn't realized it before. Like they say: it's only in adversity that you find out who your friends are.

So, I have a few days free at least while I interview, etc. with other areas of the company, and I intend to go do something pleasant. I don't know what, yet--but I do plan to have fun, go somewhere, etc.

Meanwhile, I have been playing more with this angora mix, and have just about settled on a mix of black angora, 15-micron merino (oooohhhhhh so soft), and silk--shine, softness, and angora fuzz. I think it's gonna be great.

Tien