Because I am bored and like the idea, and because it might get me to DO something with the massive selection of craft items in my house....

I will send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment here on my blog. I don’t yet know what that gift will be, but you will receive it within 365 days. The only thing you have to do in return is "pay it forward" by making a similar agreement on your blog.

This could be baked goods, small crocheted items , a woven basket, or a small skein of handspun yarn (probably enough for a hat or something) if I know you knit or crochet.  Hints are acceptable.  Heck, hints are welcome! :p

I had a really good weekend.  I went to the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Festival  Friday through Sunday.    It’s the first event of this type I’ve attended, and it was a lot of fun!  The weather was perfect – sunny, upper 70s, light breeze – and the park it was held at made for a nice setup.    I took 1 all-day and 3 half-day workshops all told.  

The best was the silk spinning class with Patsy Sue Zawistoski (http://spinningguru.com/) which was all day Friday;  there were only 3 of us in the class, and we ran about 2 hours over, so we really put her through it!  We sampled several different fiber preps for both bombyx and tussah silk – from raw but degummed cocoons, to combed top.   I found the cap/hanky preps pretty easy to spin overall, and bought one to play with from Babe’s Gardens for $5.  I also really enjoyed spinning the dyed tussah top – interestingly, dyed was easier to spin then undyed.   I hated spinning the noil roving – I don’t do well with short staples.  I also found it difficult to spin the bombyx top  -- I couldn’t seem to get enough twist in, and from the fold was hard for me to draft properly – but I think that will improve with practice.   I’ll practice on tussah first though, bombyx is too expensive to ruin!  I was the least experienced spinner amongst the three of us, and it showed, but I felt like I learned a lot.    

Patsy made a few adjustments to my wheel that I hadn't known enough to do (I bought it assembled).  I confirmed that  an Ashford Traditional is not a convenient wheel for carrying to workshops (I gave myself a whopper of a bruise, and pulled a few muscles) and I still can’t get the hang of starting/stopping single treadle with my feet, and using my hands was more inconvenient then usual with the silk.  I'm thinking a small double-treadle will be better for this sort of event.

The ‘miss america wave’ variant on the Andean plying method was quite handy for sample plying though – I hadn’t used Andean plying previously.  We also discussed two-ply vs three-ply for crochet (since that's what I primarily do) and she pointed out that a crochet stitch sortof IS a three-ply in comparison to what a knitting stitch does.   So, while 3ply is a stronger yarn then 2ply, that might be less of a concern when crocheting.  I think I'll spend some more time spinning 2plys, and experiment -- it would certainly help alleviate the problem of heavier, denser fabric with more yarn consumption!

I also really enjoyed the Triple Twined Basketweaving workshop; I’ve taken basketweaving before, but not in probably 10 years.   This basket pattern had a round wooden base into which the ‘spokes’ were inserted, and then you do a triple weave pattern around those spokes.  It used round reed, not flat.  I did mine in natural, navy blue, and red.   Made for a rather patriotic basket :p   It’s a spiral pattern, and was quite attractive.   One of the others in the workshop used natural, navy, and green, and I have to say that made a truly lovely color pattern.   I bought the kit to do it a second time, as well as a kit for a considerably more complicated pattern.   For about the same cost overall as the half-day workshop, I could go to the shop the teacher owns in East Troy and take an all-day class.  Might be worth the drive some weekend, assuming Sisca would also be interested.

Because I’m interested in learning to weave eventually I took a workshop in square loom weaving.  It was fun, and I’ll play with the (small) loom some more to get a feel for the patterns, but if I decide to do much more with it I’ll be getting Mike to build me a larger loom – this one is really only adequate for sampling – the resulting squares would make a good coaster, and I’m not interested in piecing a bunch together.

I should have skipped the exotic fibers workshop I took Sat aft.  In the first place, it was expensive – I could have obtained 1 oz samples of all those fibers, with the possible exception of the two dog furs, on my own for less I think.  Which is fine, if one actually learns something, since in theory that's really what you're paying for.   Basically, we got 14 fiber samples (about an oz of each) which we were to spin/ply first alone, then blended with wool -- the camelids, cashmere, angora etc -- basically, the hair/fur fibers.  But, in a 3 hour workshop, there really wasn’t enough time to get through them all, let alone spend enough time on it to get a good feel for what we were doing.   Further, with that constant flow plus the number of students I didn’t feel that the teacher actually had time to teach – I will get as much out of taking them home and sampling them on my own as I did in that workshop.  All in all, I should have skipped it.   A solid slate of workshops meant I didn’t get enough time to really browse through the vendor area as much as I might have liked, I never made it to the art show, and I ended up skipping watching the fleece to shawl demo on Sunday because I was so very tired; this one would have been a good one to swap out for ‘breathing room’.

I did my best to take different types of workshops each day; the only reason I ended up in two spinning classes was that all the crocheting classes were cancelled due to an illness and I had to hurriedly rebook (which is when I ended up in the exotic fibers class).  But there were also classes in knitting, felting, wood carving, and beading that I saw in progress – it was really a good variety!  I do hope that the made enough to do this again next year – I know that they had trouble with enrollment levels (the lovely range of choices in classes also meant the students were spread a bit thin) and with people sneaking in without paying admission, cutting into their profit margin considerably.

This was one of those weekends that reminds me that at some point in the next 3-5 years I want to move back south.

Saturday was a surprise 40^th birthday party for my brother.   I was unable to find flights that worked from a cost/time-in-transit point of view, but I still feel badly that I was unable to attend.   It’s just the sort of thing that is nice to have family at.   Plus it would have given me a chance to see my nieces and nephews, who I don’t see often enough.

Rather more dramatically, my parents both took ill this weekend, reminding me that they are actually getting on in years.    My father found himself in the hospital Friday night with chest pain and nausea.   As a diabetic with a heart history they of course assumed heart attack and reacted accordingly.   However, he didn’t respond to nitroglycerin, and the tests showed nothing heart-oriented, but did show gallstones.  By late Sunday he had passed the stone, and the pain was gone; they conceded that there really wasn’t anything serious, and let him go home, and he now has a follow-up appointment with a GI specialist.   In the meantime, my mother’s rather serious cold, complicated by asthma and lack of sleep, worsened considerably.   After a rather pointed “you have seen a doctor” comment from her doctor DIL, she let my sister take her to the emergency clinic on Sun afternoon, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia.

I am as a rule fairly laid back, and take things in stride.  However, I do evince a desire for control, and my inability to DO something, is bugging the hell out of me.  It’s difficult to be in-control long distance :/

Other then phone stress, it was a relatively relaxed weekend.    We went card-shopping – I bought a “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” song birthday card for my brother, and a “Conga” song congratulations card for a friend who is graduating from medical school.  In WoW Sisca used his 40 wizard to run my druid through the Deadmines instance a couple of times; we failed to get Van Cleef, but she did go from 18 to 20 and picked up a great ring and weapon, while he got lots of drops to disenchant.  We also spent some time in Lord of the Rings Online; Saturday we hooked up with a small group that was running through the ‘Retaking Weathertop’ questline at the same time we were – we hadn’t planned to be able to finish it at 20, but since the group included a level 35 hunter we were able to do so.   Sunday we hooked up with Pentane and ran some more quests, including completing an instance the two of us alone had failed on a few times; unfortunately we wiped on the Book 1, Chapt 11 instance, so we’ll have to give that another attempt.   We’re all 21 now though at least, and we agreed to a weekly Sunday run.  So geeky we are.  This means I now have standing groups in three different games – Sun in LotRO, Mon in WoW, and Tues in Civ IV.  If we could get a standing group in EQ2 I’d be set! :p

I’m not much of a tv watcher these days.   I generally own a tv, if only to be able to watch the Olympics and the occasional basketball game, but it isn’t necessarily plugged in.   The last show I actively watched was Ground Force on the BBC; the last network shows I made a point of watching were Mann and Machine, and Brisco County Jr.   So, yeah, I’m not exactly cognizant of current television.

Last May, Sisca happened to catch an episode of a show he thought I would enjoy, so he recorded the season finale and pushed me to watch it.  I found it entertaining enough that he recorded it this year, and every now and then I watched an episode – I figure I saw one or two episodes from last year, and a few of the early episodes from this past fall (the start of season 3).    About a month or so ago, I was suffering a bit of gaming malaise, with a similar disinterest in my books.   Sisca convinced me to do a bit of catching up on ‘my’ show; for whatever reason, we only had episodes beginning early this year (late Jan/early Feb).   By the time I was ‘caught up’ (the week before the season finale!) I was hooked;  I ordered the first two seasons on DVD and starting watching those.  Sunday night, round about midnight, I finally finished.   Sadly, the season ended with a bit of a cliff hanger, the new season doesn’t commence until late September, and the season 3 DVD won’t be available until early Sept.

Because I was stifling my laughter at work, I share:

“I Has a Sweet Potato” http://littera-abactor.livejournal.com/7748.html

And “Dogs in Elks”:

http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

This was not one of our more typical weekends.   We played just enough LotRO to get our main characters from 19 to 20, and no more.  We went to Wood Craft, where Sisca  bought a lathe, and to a new spinning store Wool, Warp and Wheel, where I bought a few things – including a hand-spindle after the owners spent ten minutes or so showing me how to use one/having me practice.  While my purchases were rung up, Sisca happened to mention the lathe, and the owner asked him if he would be interested in making some tools for her – she sells ‘hand weaving’ kits at reenactments, in which she puts 4 ‘weaving needles’ – they looked rather like fat wooden knitting needles, albeit shorter (about 6”), and the non-pointed end was actually flattened with a hole in it for the yarn to be threaded.   She said she was looking for 50! sets of 4, and would he be interested in supplying her?  She said that the person who used to make them for her just used dowels as the base wood, and warned him that they were really boring to make, but he said he’d make up a couple sets for her and then discuss pricing.   

As to the rest of the weekend, somehow it revolved around television /bemused.  I tend to treat the DVR as something that watches TV so I don’t have to, but Sisca actually watches what he records, usually while I’m playing Civ or spinning.   Saturday morning while I spun Sisca finished catching up on his dvr’d episodes of Monk; technically I don’t watch the show (the spinning wheel is in an adjacent room) but I find it entertaining, so I listen, and occasionally come out to clarify what’s going on, or watch ‘the reveal’ at the end.     Despite not watching Monk, I still ended up watching more TV this weekend then I normally manage in a year – the remainder of the weekend was spent catching up on the only show taped for me – we watched at least 2 months worth of episodes of Numb3rs, I’m almost caught up!