Staying In

Luckily, my home, my family and the area in which I live is safe from the multiple fires burning rampant in Southern California. However, even with all the doors and windows closed, the winds are blowing all sorts of allergens and irritants that sneak through the tiniest of crevices into the house. I already suffer from terrible year-round allergies and mild asthma, and all the dust and smoke is knocking my entire body out of whack, even with a slew of drugs. Thus, not wanting to aggravate my lungs and sinus further, I think I will remain a shut-in for the majority of the week.

Last night, instead of going to spinning group with my fiber friends, Carolyn came over to my house and spun on her Ashford Traveler. I had already finished plying "cotton candy" (but haven't yet blocked it) and didn't want to spin undyed roving, so I worked on the lace stole for my stepmother instead. It's going slowly, but I've completed half of it already. I contemplated doing 2 separate halves and then grafting it together, but the pattern is small enough that I don't think it'd obvious which way is which, and so certainly, not worth the trouble of trying to graft over 100 stitches.

I also tried to dry a couple of hats a little before I attempted to block by laying them on a towel on my kitchen table. To my surprise, I found one of the cats on the hats. I had not expected one of the naughty ones to bother with the hats because they were wet, but I guess I was wrong. The gray hat is a gift for a Buddhist nun, so now I have to re-wash it and pick out all the cat hairs. Damn cat!

This is another one of the photos I scanned Sunday night. I'm not sure when it was taken, but I'm estimating that my mom was probably about 20-23 years old in the photo.

Memories

Yes, I've been in the dark ages. I never used a scanner until tonight. Instead, I've been handing things over to hubby to scan things for me. My dad's birthday is coming up soon, so we got him a digital photo frame. I started uploading some digital photos I had into the frame, but then I thought it'd be nice to scan some old photos of my sister and me and upload those as well. I don't think hubby would appreciate scanning hundreds of old photos that have no personal meaning to him, so we finally hooked up a scanner for me tonight.

I couldn't find the baby album that my dad put together for me about 10 years ago. I think it's still somewhere in our garage from our move 3 years ago. Yep, like many people we still have unpacked boxes. Anyway, I still managed to find several old photos and proceed to archive all of them. Once I find my baby album, I intend to archive everything.

Going through the photos was somewhat bittersweet. My dad's birthday is coming up next week, but this week is also the 2nd anniversary of my mom's passing. I don't want to go into details about feelings and all that, since I still want to keep this a mostly-crafty blog, but I think I can sum it simply: it really bites.

Since we scattered her ashes, I haven't visited the locations (half in Texas Hill Country, half in the woods of Northern California). My sister made a special visit last year (she lives a lot closer to the location). Perhaps I will make a trip next year. In the meantime, my visits will be in spirit and via my memories.

Cotton Candy

A while back, I had purchased some Brown Sheep mill end rovings at a craft fair to which I dyed some happy-go-lucky colors using some dyes leftover from another dye job. Having temporarily given up on spinning lace weight alpaca, I started spinning the mill end rovings during my knitting group's beach knitting day. My knitting friends thought the roving looked like cotton candy, especially the ones that I had combed out into rolags.

Regarding the lace alpaca that I have been trying to spin for the last several months -- I actually had no choice but to stop, because combined with the cobweb-thin spinning and my lack of skills, the yarn constantly broke. For the last few months, I have been unable to find where it had broken off. The end somehow disappeared onto the spool. I've even recruited multiple people to try to find it for me, and I have even tried picking at it with a wire a multitude of times. Anyone have tips on how to find it? *sigh*

I managed to finish spinning the "cotton candy" during some down time while my family was visiting. All I have to do now is to block the yarn and decide what to do with it.
Fiber Content: approx. 95% wool, 5% mohair (I tried to remove and separate as much mohair as possible)
Dye/Color Method: Randomly applied colors using leftover dyes from another dye job; done over the stove using Jacquard and ProChem dyes and citric acid.

Butterflies

I've been doing some back-breaking cleaning everyday for the past 2 weeks. You see, I have many visitors: my in-laws from Southeast Asia, my dad and stepmother from Texas and my godmother from Taiwan. All my visitors are very nice people, but still...there is some stress and anxiety from having out-of-town visitors. I worry about making sure that my house is clean and meticulously orderly (I'm not horrible, but this area is not my forte), and I worry about places to take them. Needless to say, I haven't been crafting or knitting much.

For the last several weeks I have been working on this stole. It's my own design. I custom hand-painted it in shades of navy and blue from my stepmother. The larger center panel is a modified snowshoe lace, but it reminds me of butterfly cocoons. The photo is a little overexposed and it will be much better after I finish and block it. I'm not sure when I will be able to finish it -- I certainly won't be working on it much this month. Also, I've had to rip many parts of it out already. That's what I get for trying to knit lace at knitting group.

Several days ago, I took some of my visitors to the San Juan Capistrano Mission, where we took in the splendor of the building and the beautiful garden. We were lucky enough to see lots of monarch butterflies fluttering happily with the wind. We even spotted some cocoons, and I managed to get some macro shots of the monarchs.