Thursday, August 25, 2011

New to the Girl Cave

Katie checks it out by chaimann
Katie checks it out, a photo by chaimann on Flickr.
Last weekend, I bought a spinning wheel. I've been spinning on spindles for a few years now, so I knew I liked the process. I had already been thinking about finding a wheel, and then an unexpected windfall showed up, and... What do you know? My half of the windfall was just a few dollars less than the price of a Schacht Ladybug, which was high on my list of "well-regarded wheels that I can afford and which are carried at the nearest fiber shop". So, I picked up my friend Sue for enabling support, and we went shopping.

The first couple of days with the wheel were really frustrating. It's a machine, after all, with quite a few moving parts that affect how it performs. That first day, if it didn't pull hunks of unspun fiber right out of my hands, then it twisted it into a kinked mess. I bugged people on Ravelry, looked at books, and Googled problems I didn't know how to describe. Every day, I tweaked things and tried again. Today, I finally got something approaching the kind of yarn I know I can make on a spindle.

Today was also the first day that Katie decided to come closer and check out the wheel. Surely that is a good omen.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Four houses

Four houses by chaimann
Four houses, a photo by chaimann on Flickr.
My friends Alex and Lillian have been doing art projects together. They'll pick a photo of an art object, and then they will both reproduce it.

Recently, Lillian picked a photo of a really cool building, and I couldn't resist taking a crack at it myself.