Splinter

Today I'm leaving for the Friends and Fiberworks Summer Retreat in Asheville, NC. Of course this is not without its difficulties. First the power went out rendering useless my skein winder and printer (both of which I needed). Instead I sewed buttons on a vest (no picture yet but it's cute, take my word for it). Just as I had decided to go clean out the car to start loading for the show the power came back on. I was able to print the patterns I needed (free with the purchase of one skein of aran weight yarn!) and also to start winding some yarn. That's when things really started to fly. Literally. The yarn got tangled and yanked the swift at a very high rate of speed towards the skeiner and one of the arms of the winder snapped.

 Yikes.

Can we say, impalement?

Honestly, it could have been worse. I guess this is why metal swifts are actually useful. I was going to fix it with Gorilla Glue but the stuff was dried in the bottle.

I guess it does work. Maybe too well.

So my second option was a glue gun.

You know it's ready when it spews molten glue from the end.

The following are my steps to fixing a wooden swift with a hot glue gun:
1. Make sure glue is super heated (see picture above).
2. Burn yourself on the glue once to get things started on the right foot.
3. Rig the pieces of broken swift into position.
4. Haphazardly apply molten glue to pieces of swift.

5. Make sure you leave gaps and bits of splintery wood exposed.
6. Fill in gaps with glue and cover splintery bits with glue as well.
7. The more amateur this looks the better.

8. Burn yourself with the glue once more for good measure.
9. Unplug glue gun and voila! you're done!
Extra points if you get a splinter in the process.

Testing of the "fixed" swift is about to commence. I hope I don't lose an eye.

Edited to add: Have tested the swift and it appears to be working! Huzzah!

I Spoke Too Soon

After raving yesterday about how great things were going, this morning it all came back to bite me in the butt. It wasn't any one thing, just a bunch of little things. Let's start from the beginning shall we.

7:30 Cat wants me to feed her so she steps on my face to wake me up. (In retrospect this kind of makes me laugh.) Feed cat, go back to bed.

8:00 Wake up to see if I got an email from my private lesson student who was sick on Monday and may have to cancel today. No email.

9:15 Drag self out of bed. Check email. A response. He is coming today. Decide to stay up because I need to reskein and label yarn before going to see my mom.

9:30 Begin redesigning all labels.

10:00 Finish labels. Put skein of yarn on PVC swift to be wound into a ball. Once it's in ball form I will rewind it onto the swift then twist and label it.

10:05 Realize I began pulling from the wrong end of the yarn. And that the PVC pipe swift sucks at being a swift. It won't turn fast enough and is pulling the yarn.

10:10 Start trying to wind from other end. Realize you had the right end the first time. Yarn begins to tangle.

10:30 * Wind a little yarn onto ball winder, take ball of yarn off the winder, wind by hand through the tangled parts, re-wind onto the ball winder, repeat from * 3-5 times. Decide to finish winding mass o' tangled yarn by hand.

11:00 Take a break to make reservations for birthday dinner with friends on Friday. Find out that there are 5 other large parties there so can't make reservations. They will have to make room for us when we come. Fantastic. (Please note sarcasm.)

11:05 Continue hand winding yarn.

11:30 Teach private percussion lesson.

12:30 Eat lunch.

1:00 Call mom and tell her you got tangled up (literally) this morning and are running late to hang out with her. She tells me not to worry about coming over. She's had a rough morning too. Her inside kitty's heart murmur is worse and a friend's baby boy died of some as yet unknown genetic disease that almost killed his big sister 2 years earlier.

1:15 Finish hand winding 1st skein of yarn. Pull out old, wooden, hand made swift to finish making other balls of yarn. Will use PVC swift (now PVC skeiner only) to make hanks.

1:30-3:30 Finish winding other sock yarn into neat hanks for selling.

3:35 Decide to re-skein lace weight.

3:37 After winding a tiny bit of the lace weight into a ball realize this is going to take a long time and contemplate scrapping the idea. Realize it might be easier to wind yarn from old, wooden swift onto PVC skeiner.

3:38-4:00 Tinker with getting the set up between the swift and skeiner right so that the swift will turn smoothly and the skeiner will catch the yarn correctly.

4:00 Handle on skeiner breaks. Wonder if the screw has been stripped. Realize the screw is fine, it's just been turned so many times in the PVC pipe it's made a bigger hole and now just turns and turns in the little hole without being grippy. This happens, of course, after you already have several, several yards of yarn wound and cannot take the arms of the windmill off to remove the broken handle.
Picture of broke a$$ handle.

4:02-5:15 Continue to mollycoddle yarn onto skeiner. Handle flops in the way. Turn the windmill by hand. Yarn snags on old, wooden swift. Pieces of swift are literally flying off. Stop and stoop to fix swift, then yarn, then start turning skeiner again. Yarn begins to fly off skeiner in loops because it's too tight and is pushing the first few rows over the caps and off into mid-air. Pray that this will just work long enough to finish this one skein. Also, say a lot of words that are unbecoming of a lady.

5:16 Decide never to reskein lace again (unless there is machinery involved).

5:17 Remember that sometimes, when your life is moving in the right direction, Satan will try and attack you the hardest. Feel bad about the curse words. Pray for forgiveness and some relief from horrible, broken equipment. (Not that I feel like some spiritual vigilante armed with dye, yarn, and set of needles but I have prayed a lot about my little business and seen some wonderful results. So maybe I am a spiritual warrior of the yarn-y persuasion.)

5:18-5:35 Picture and label all yarn. (I'd post a picture off all the new colors I dyed, which were really lovely, btw, but the light was terrible and I need to fix them.)

5:37 Feed screaming cat.

5:43 Rush to knit night.

6:00-8:15 Sell lots of yarn, hang out with friends, finish left front of test knit sweater (see below), chat, drink frappacino, have a good time, make up for most of the crappy morning.
8:30 Drive through Wendy's and get Caesar salad for dinner.

8:45 Eat.

9:05-9:45 Upload pictures, cuddle with cat, write blog post.

Very Sleepy So No Clever Title

First off a quick update on what I did Thursday night. I went to the local Irish pub to hear my friend Jim (a.k.a. James Patrick Morgan) perform. Jim has an amazing voice and he covered a whole range of songs. He even played Hootie and the Blowfish and Oasis, two of my all-time favorite bands, so he was ok by me :) A lot of my friends were out that night as well and I had a lovely time hanging out with everyone and letting my friend E.B. put me in stitches by just being himself. A good time was had by all and I'm glad I actually went out.

Fast forward to now

Do you ever have one of those moments when you are working on something and you realize that no matter how hard you try things aren't going to work out? But you realize you are also too far gone to start over? That's where I am with this Warm Woolies vest I'm knitting.
I have about 6 more inches to knit of the front and back of this thing and I'm not going to have enough yarn. Don't believe me?
Yeah, not enough. My frogging back point would have been when this was only 5 or 6 inches long but now I'm really in the thick of it. My solution is to keep knitting and sub in another yarn when this one runs out. Yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that I only have 2 skeins of the color that I've been using. Thankfully I have the same yarn in a different colorway so maybe it won't be too bad. We shall see.

I also realized that I never showed you the finished swift that I was making last week.
I used this set up a few times but ended up taking the lazy susan back. It was the cheap plastic kind and every 20 or so turns the little do-dad (technical term) on the bottom wouldn't spin correctly and the whole thing would almost fly off the tray table it's sitting on. I went back and purchased a 14" bamboo lazy susan that was $3 more than the plastic one and it works much better. The plastic one did work for a little while.
So I wound up a few skeins that were lying around. The new and improved swift being used for skeining yarn for dyeing which may or may not take place tomorrow depending on how tired I am after church.
Cat included for scale...kind of.

The ball of yarn that was on the original swift in the pictures above is my Stop Light colorway. I used the swift to reskein it and took some better pictures of it.
It really reminds me more of sherbet when it's been reskeined but I don't know if I will change the name.
Still pretty though!

Tonight's Penelope pictures show two of the many sides of my cat:
Sweet and innocent
and grumpy and unconcerned.