Happy Valentine's Day

I hope everyone had a Happy Valentine's Day. Shaggy loved his dragon & Toberlone gift (I call it the Hobo Dragon, what with his cardboard sign.) Shaggy gave me the most beautiful pink, purple and white bouquet of flowers. :)

We did a bit of shopping today. Shaggy doesn't usually get Saturday off, but it's Family Day Weekend so I get him to myself for 3 whole days!

We stopped at Romni and bought some wool and some yarn I need to make a gift (not telling who it's for. :p) Shaggy spotted some beautiful knitting needles in the size I needed for my project (and only .80 cents more expensive then then the other not quite so spiffy ones) I picked up a pound of Welsh White wool to spin, but it's really scratchy! It's hard to tell when it's in a plastic bag. I think next time I'll pay the extra $2 a pound for the Coopworth like I did last week (in bit's right now being dyed as I type) Oh well, it spins well at least. I'm gonna see if it gets softer with some wool wash or something.

The mohair/merino/nylon yarn is drying too. It's plied, set and ready to dye. I only got 50 yards out of it though 0.o I'm waiting for some more roving to arrive in the mail. I'm gonna ply that with the Coopworth and use both yarns to make a stripy scarf.

We then went on to the Eaton Centre and found some beautiful tins for $1 each! I would have bought the whole lot of them, but I don't think Shaggy wants 10 plaid tins about the apartment (He hates plaid >.<) so I only got two. I'm going to use them to store crafty things or even just to store the small strips of roving I spin from.

I finally found a copy of Katamari Damacy. Shaggy thought it was interesting. He's actually better at it them I am, but I'm sure I'll get better with practice.

I *heart* my new drop spindle

After a few attempts at finding a decently priced spinning wheel on Kijiji and frustrations with my current drop spindle I picked up a new spindle at Romni Wools. A shiny new lacquered 3.0 oz Ashford top whorl drop spindle.

My biggest complaint with my Ashford Student spindle was that the yarn wouldn't stay put in the hook. It would come off the bottom part of the shaft and I'd have no tension while spinning. Two little notches in the whorl solved that problem!

That and well, it looks a lot nicer. :)

I spun some organic mohair/merino roving on it. The spindle doesn't even seem that full even with 3.5 oz of roving on it. And I'm sure if I had wound it better I'd get more. The yarn seems to be spun a bit better too. I'm was able to spin and draft at the same time, rather then park and drafting (spinning the spindle, stopping it, then letting the accumulated twist travel up the yarn instead of doing it pretty much simultaneously)

I'm going to ply this with some faux cashmere for a 2 ply yarn. I have some spun up, but I'm going to transfer what I have done to my new spindle and spin it on that.

It's snowing a ton outside right now. I'm so glad that I don't have to go into the salon to work this week. (I'm so glad I can work from home now!) Shaggy hasn't come home yet and I hope this snow doesn't make it hard for him to get home. I think I'm going to make some muffins tonight, it's a bit chilly in here (the living room have huge windows, so the air in front of them gets cold easily). The oven will warm the place up quite a bit. I baked a "chick'n" burger with rice "cheese" for lunch and the place stayed pretty toasty for a few hours. Usually it's quite warm in here, but our heaters just can't keep up with the cold and the wind. The rooms with smaller windows seem to be fairing much better. The pigs must be so glad to be in the den.

Shaggy and I spent the weekend in Waterloo attending our niece's birthday party. The snow didn't really help that either. :P We went laser tagging and I did ok (I placed third) I didn't feel very well, so that didn't help things along. We accidentally got her the same gift as her parents so we just ended up giving her $40 and some fun girly hair stuff. And now I have a copy of Pokemon Battle Revolution (copy of said game was opened before we knew so it's not like we could return it. Besides I was kinda wanted a copy myself.)

And people wonder why I tend to stick to gift cards. You can never have too many of those!

More fresh yarn

Ok, so I kinda sorta stayed up past midnight making yarn last night. :P But hey, who doesn't want to wake up to a nice yarntini?

The two skeins ended up making 54 yards. Not enough to make much of anything. :( But I think I'll have just enough to make a bag for one of my smaller tarot decks. What better to wrap your divination tools in then something you worked on for hours? Forget sleeping with your cards under your pillow, think of how much energy, focus and cursing went into the yarn and the resulting knitting.

And now more shots of the yarn, just because I can. :P

Now I just have to wait for it to dry a bit more so I can wind it into balls and start knitting with it. :)

Hopefully my next yarn looks better. I want to make thinner yarn and ply it so it looks a bit more like well, yarn. The vast majority of yarn is plied, and plied yarn is supposed to be a lot easier to work with.

That and I like the idea of dual coloured yarn. :)

Fresh Yarn

I finished a small bit of yarn today. The roving came in 2 oz braids so I'm dividing the yarn into balls that way. 2 oz doesn't quite fill up the spindle, but it comes close. I figured I'd rather process two equal halves then one really big half and one small half.

I've spun other bits of roving before, but they end result really didn't look like yarn. And I really didn't want to post pictures of it. So this isn't my first try at spinning but it's my first somewhat successful try. :)

A belated Happy Imbolc

A belated happy Imbolc to all (and Happy Groundhog Day too)! We had a huge snowstorm up here. It was a quiet Imbolc, given that I'm still trying to organize things around here and get into some sort of flow.

Got back to belly dance this week. I realized how much I missed it. I'm going to get a mirror for the living room, so that I can practice in a larger space. Having the stereo handy will be nice too. It's sucks trying to belly dance with an iPod.

I finished LocoRoco! All 5 worlds. I'm so happy. I never beat video games! I never manage to stay focused enough to keep to one game (I'm inflicted with "Oooohhh Shiny!" syndrom)

I figure I'll try to stick to one console and one handheld game at a time. So right now it's FFVII & Sonic Rivals (I got in on sale at Zeller's. I picked up the last copy they had. Yeah me!) We'll see how that goes.