So Fancy!

Well, last night my family and I had dinner together. This is not a meal we have very often, but it's something a few friends have remarked is interesting and unique. We have "snobby night" or "fancy night" or "cheese and wine night". They're all the same concept, but we change the name every so often. My brother does not have any memory of experiencing this before, so I think it's been quite some time since we've done this so, yeah. Info for you!

The concept is we have a bunch of cheese, deli meats, crackers, fresh fruit, artisan bread, olives, nuts, etc all spread out. The picture above does not have most of the meal there, sadly, but I could only get a snapshot of it before the swarm came by and unfortunately not everything was laid out at that point.

We tend to have lots of food leftover for several days, so it is pretty good for snacking later. It's essentially finger foods for a meal. Everyone has their plate and we camp out in the living room watching a movie and eating. It's a really cool experience, since we tend to share which particular cheese/cracker/meat/olive/fruit/etc combination is particularly tasty. It's generally just really fun.

However, I did mention wine in this and here is what we do for this particular type. You get some fairly cheap strawberry or any type of fruit wine that is not grape, we usually go for Arbor Mist brand, and add the type of fruit it's made from. It sits and soaks up the flavor and ends up being a lovely surprise at the end of the glass. We went for strawberry wine this time around!

It ends up being a beautiful addition. We usually add the fruit to the actual wine bottle, but my sister seems to have developed some sort of minor allergy to strawberries. It's still good, though!

I am not going to even pretend that this is cheap fare, but it is nice every so often. My brother commented that something special must have happened because all of this was so fancy! He is a cute kid and he really enjoyed the meal. We had crab salad added in, mainly for his benefit, and he went nuts over it.

First Fleece: Procurement

Well, as many of my spinning friends (and some non-spin buds, too!) are aware, I have obtained a raw fleece.

The Story

Right, so my friend happens to be working as a volunteer out at Fiesta Farm and they have sheep. I'm guessing for the petting zoo or something. Anyway, the owner was selling the raw fleeces of mutt or unknown breed sheep and, when I heard about this, I totally jumped on it. This was a few months ago and I had not seen her until our potluck knit night, and I reminded her and then promptly forgot again (because that's how these things work). Then, we set up a spin day on Thursday and that's finally when I actually remembered and had cash on hand and so... yeah! I came home with a fleece. It's an incredibly huge bag and it is smooshy.

So, this is my very first fleece. I am going to obtain the necessary equipment to get it nice and clean for carding and spinning. Luckily, my friend has a drum carder and has totally offered to lend it to me or let me sit around at her house and keep her company while I use it. Score! I will probably set it up as my main project for June because Tour de Fleece begins at the end of the month and apparently I have absolutely nothing to actually do (hah!). Anyway, I am very excited about this project I have undertaken and will be doing some research about good ways to clean it up and sort it. I will be sure to share the techniques I use and the results, as always. 

I guess I really didn't think I was quite crazy enough when I started spinning...

Louise's Road To Recovery, Part I

Well, today went a lot better. I checked on her before I went to work, tried giving her some water in the syringe as I have been doing periodically to ensure she is getting fluids without having to struggle up to the water bottle. I checked her skin for signs of dehydration and she has none, so that is hopeful. After work, I came home and gave her her medicine and some snacks to make sure she is getting some food before the other three go and stash it. She is doing a lot better. She is much more energetic, interested in food, and if I'm not mistaken... I think her head tilt is slightly better than it was Tuesday. It could just be that she is feeling more perky now that she is getting medicine and has more energy to lift up or something, but even my mom and sister remarked that it looks better.

With her having more energy, I had a bit more trouble giving her her medicine today. Fun stuff, right? She took it pretty well, honestly my bigger beasts are significantly worse about it and they don't have anywhere near the same capacity for wiggling as she does. I'm glad I had to fight her, though, it means she's got more strength and alertness!

  

These are the pictures from this afternoon. Compare them to the one I took last night of her snuggled up in my shirt as I gave her little snacks and watched Battlestar Galactica.

 

I see a huge improvement in general appearance, absolutely. She is a lot more alert and looks less sickly. A lot of people might be concerned about the amount of time I'm indicating that she is lazing about on my lap or in my shirt or nuzzled up against my neck. Nah. She has always been interested in snuggling up and is my rat for things like reading or sitting and watching tv or knitting. Perfectly content to be pretty still and enjoy random little snacks and petting of the ears. The others will go run off and create mazes among the couch cushions or glomp my mom's chihuahua, but Louise has always been a mama's girl.

Anyway, things seem like they are looking up and I am glad. Even when I put her back in the cage, she seemed to be getting around much better so I'm nowhere near as worried about her ability to access food and water as I was. Now I am going to go to bed, because I am completely exhausted and have an awesome Thursday planned. :)

Louise

Well, yesterday I made a pretty horrific discovery. I went to go feed the rats and noticed that Louise was having some weird thing going on with her head. I picked her up and it was like she was unable to lift one side of her face from the floor or from that orientation. She looks like the rat in this video:

So, I did a bit of research and found out that this condition is called head tilt and indicates a problem with the inner ear and balance. This can be caused by ear infections, strokes, and pituitary tumors. So, I stayed up watching her until about 3 am and she does not seem to be having any problems getting to her water or food, though I did take her out of the cage and give her a bit of water out of a spoon and she seemed willing to take it, though not particularly thirsty. Better to be safe than sorry, right?

So, I woke up at 7 am and called our vet at Ten West Bird and Animal Hospital. I had never taken any of the rats up there, as they have never had any health problems, but Dr. Powers helped us a lot when we had ferrets when I was little. Anyway, the only appointment I could get that did not interfere with work was at 5:30 pm. Kind of a long wait, but I went for it and went back to bed, completely exhausted. As luck would have it, work was cancelled today so I called them back and made an appointment for 4:30 pm instead. She was really less than enthused about the being in the car part and preferred to lay around in the scary carrying bag and wait for the awfulness to be over:

When I got there, they weighed her and she is about 13.5 oz, kind of on the smaller side for her age. She has lost a bit of weight with all of the health issues, I think, because she did feel a bit smaller. They checked her out and Dr. Powers was very helpful and gentle. I went in there completely sure that they would want to euthanize her. Her head tilt is pretty bad and it happened very quickly, which to me indicates something horrible. I am a horrible worrywort, though. Dr. Powers said that she saw no definitive signs pointing to an ear infection, nothing in her ears at all. However, an ear infection would be the most treatable condition at this point, so we decided to treat it as that and see if it helped at all. So, she gave me several medications for her to take for two weeks and then come in for a follow up.


Mometamax - ear drops to help with a possible ear infection

Baytril - antibiotic taken by mouth, seems to be commonly prescribed

Metacam - for pain and inflammation, hopefully to help with the inflammation in her inner ear and help with the head tilt, plus this cannot be too fun so pain relief is good, too. She did not want to give her a steroid, so she opted for this instead to see if it would work.

Artificial Tear Ointment - for her right eye, which is facing much at a downward angle and the tears are to help keep it from getting injured, to be given 3 times daily

Amazingly enough, this whole thing only cost me like $150. It isn't cheap, but it was a lot better than I was afraid it would be. 

She took her medicine like a champ and did not fuss or try to bite or anything, so that's good. I don't know if that should worry me further as it seems to indicate she is feeling absolutely awful. Anyway, she more than earned her little mini-snack of apple sauce as a reward for her bravery.

Here's to hoping that she perks up and does better. She has always been my favorite of the four, though I try not to say it too loudly for the other three to hear. She has always been sort of socially awkward and very clingy and shy. Heck, for the first month or two after I brought her home she shirt dived and refused to leave the comforting confines of my bra during play time. She has really gotten much better, but she is still shy and awkward. I think it's all of the extra work and effort I have had to put in to seeing her grow into a well-socialized little beast that makes me love her so. Plus, she gives awesome rattie kisses! Right now she is resting comfortably in the cage. I went ahead and cleaned it up very well and made a few furniture modifications to allow her to get around a bit better, so we will see how she does. I am hopeful that she will return to her adorable self again soon.

Spinning Insanity

Lately, I have been jumping in on the spinning bandwagon again. I'm glad. I have seen a huge amount of progress in the past few weeks. So, let's give a time line, shall we?

This yarn was spun up on 4-26-2012, the day I quit smoking. I will be honest, it seems spinning has helped me out quite a bit in quitting. This was spun up from some merino I purchased at Yarnivore and it's dyed locally by Alisha Goes Around. Her yarns were also at Yellow Rose, but I did not purchase anything of hers there because my local yarn shop carries her stuff. I also did not see any roving, which made me sad because I was very happy with what I got. Anyway, I actually purchased this wool quite some time ago when I was experimenting with spindling. I do still use a drop spindle here and there, and have determined that I am just better off with a bottom whorl drop spindle instead, but I stick with the wheel more often. Anyway, this is the yarn that I ended up spinning. It's... not very good. I did not record the yardage, which if I do recall was actually quite small (about 40), but it's an attempt at navajo plying. The best demo I have ever seen of this is this:

Anyway, this is the result:

I was honest, it does not look great! However, I had a bit of that roving left over s I decided to do something else with it the next day. I went ahead and spun it into a single and then plied it with a single of undyed Australian wool I spun from some roving I had laying around I had bought from Dharma Trading. Anyway, it came out much, much better. It's just a traditional 2-ply. It came out to about worsted weight and 120 yards. I really like it and hope to knit up Calorimetry from it. It's the perfect yardage for it.

Then, I went over to Yarnivore that weekend and could not help myself. I bought some BFL top and spun it up. In reality, the yarn is dyed varied orangey browns to greys, but it came out orange and brown so it's the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Yarn, officially. It also had some thick and thin here and there, but I think it came out better, still. 175 yards, 2-ply, worsted-ish.

The single:

Plied:

Next is the yarn I was spinning when I posted my last blog entry. I purchased the fiber from Natural Obsessions. It's Targhee wool in her denim colorway, 4 oz. It was unfortunately too much for one skein, so there is one that is 190ish yards and another that's 40ish, so probably somewhere around 230 yards total. It came out to be a mostly worsted weight yarn. I keep spinning thicker yarns, but I know that I'm getting thinner and thinner singles as I go on, so hopefully I will be doing better. This also had more thick/thin problems than I am happy with, but it's better than before. Also, this is the first yarn I wound up on my new niddy noddy I ordered from Nancy's Knit Knacks. I love it. Really.

Single:

Plied:

Now, finally... the fiber that I was gifted by Lazy Pi Farm's Jules. She is an awesome person and we compete on the Battlestar Galactica FPB group on Ravelry. Anyway, she gave me a few ounces of fiber from her farm and I was very happy to receive it. It's the shiniest yarn I have ever seen. It's breathtaking. I look at it and wonder how I did that. It's yarn I would see at the store and want. Anyway, it came out to something around sport or DK weight, 120 yards with some slight fluctuations out of that range, but the thick/thin is minor, as compared, and nowhere near as frequent as with the targhee yarn. It's also the first time I have done end-to-end plying. It's where you take your single, wind it up into a ball, then ply it from the outside and inside so it goes from one long single to a 2-ply. Anyway, it's a neat technique and it explains why it's wound up in the ball in the single picture.

Single:

Plied:

Anyway, I need to figure out what to do with all of this yarn! :) However, I have decided to jump in on Tour de Fleece this year. I'm excited about it! I will be on the rookie team if anyone is interested in joining us! :)

SKA May 2012

Well, I am sorry to be so late to actually discuss this as May has already been going on for a while, but I'm getting around to it! As most of you probably know already, there is a group on Ravelry called Sock Knitters Anonymous. Every month, they release a prompt and we have to cast on a sock in that month and finish it by the next month. This month's pattern was lace. Last month, the theme was literary and I ran across this pattern called Octarine Socks. It's part of a sock club based on the Discworld novels. I was pretty put out that I had not noticed it and gotten to sign up in time, but I was happy to purchase the pattern and get to work on it. Anyway, I did not have the yarn that was included in the sock club, but I have always envisioned a bit more orange in the color than the original sock yarn, so I decided to use up the orange malabrigo from my stash.

There was just one problem. The cable panel in the back made it somewhat impossible to really do well with DPNs and I had to go to Yarnivore to get a circular needle of small enough size to knit them up using the Magic Loop method. I have always been chuffed about my master of DPNs, and honestly was afraid of doing magic loop but... Wendy walked me through it at the store and I went ahead and did it. I'm pretty happy with the results and love that it's easier to try my socks on as I am knitting them, especially in the leg portion. I tend to have bigger calves than most people, apparently, so there's nothing more frustrating than knitting socks all the way down to the foot and then finding out that my fat legs just aren't going to let it be. This makes it much easier to try socks on as I'm going, plus it's pretty nifty. A lot of people say they fiddle with the needle too much but I think it just takes practice on pulling the right loop, etc. It really is much more simple than most people seem to think it is. Anyway, it worked for me and I know I will be doing magic loop again.

The right sock is done and looks AWESOME!

I will get better pictures when I knit the left sock, but I LOVE this pattern. I really, really do. I had some problems mentally wrestling with connecting the foot pattern to the leg pattern, but after some lace surgery and beating myself over the head, I got it. Her pattern is exceptionally well-written, it's just that I sometime haz a stoopid and did not read a few lines here and there. I would suggest any of her patterns and she has a very interesting blog, if anyone is interested. Anyway, I should be done with the leg portion of the pattern either today or tomorrow during my knit night, so hopefully I will have a picture of both of them up soon!

Yellow Rose Booty!

Well, it's taken me a while but I'm finally ready to talk about what happened at Yellow Rose... as in I have gotten over my serious laziness and will now post all about it! Nothing bad, it was AWESOME! When we first got there, we were greeted by a naked alpaca and llama. I got a picture, but the llama was being a douche and did not want to be photographed.

Our first stop going in was to fill out a cool form for drawings. Amazingly enough, I was the first person to win a prize! That's so crazy and cool and I was excited while walking around trying to figure out where I was supposed to go to pick it up. It contained some stickers and a skein of yarn, by Gritty Knits called Smug. It's a really striking yellow, a DK weight and I have no idea what to do with it but it is pretty and quite shiny.

Then, I returned to the booth where I was when my name was called. The shop is called Knitting Rose. The top is her Blossom yarn, it's a sockweight, and is superwash wool. Below are some minis I purchased from her, she has another yarn that contains buffalo fiber, called Budding. I believe two of the minis I purchased are of this yarn, but they are not labeled. It feels like it, though. She was a really awesome, interesting lady. She also has a podcast if anyone is interested.



Next, I explored the MAFIA booth.  Yes, the fiber world has the mafia and we do love it so. This is a group of several different fiber artists, so I will try not to blather on about them too much. But! In my Battlestar Galactica group there is an amazing, generous woman who offered to give me a birthday gift when I visited her stall. She is the owner of Lazy Pi Farm. She gave me some absolutely amazing fiber as a gift and had some sock yarn minis as freebies. I shamelessly took one, but really, really want to buy some more of her yarn. It's really good stuff. The type I got was called Elemental and it is glorious. Seriously. Go buy some right now.

Also from the MAFIA booth was The Droll Eclectic. I purchased fiber from this exact dyer before and actually spun my first yarn from it. Amazing stuff! Her shop says that she is currently on vacation, but there is amazing stuff to be had there.  I purchased some more fiber (merino) with the intent to ply them together to get a gigantic amount of yarn, I guess. We'll see. Also of note is the fact that she sells Spinolution wheels. Since I happen to own a Spinolution wheel, I am quite happy to know this and will contact her in case I need any parts or have problems with it breaking down.

After that, there was quite a lot of wandering around. I was sorely tempted by a mini niddy noddy, but I am saving myself for another, so I had to pass. I did pick up some minis at the WC Mercantile booth. It was toward the back and there were some really awesome things to be had there. I focused on the huge bowl of sock yarn minis, though.  Shamelessly. They do have some excellent sock yarn and roving, though, if anyone is interested in that.

Next up was Sky Loom Weavers. I really loved their yarns and purchased a skein of sock yarn (do you see a pattern yet?). I have never really been too fond of melon colors but this just caught my eye and I couldn't put it down. I have no idea what to do with it, but really I don't know what to do with anything, do I? There was a freebie of spinning fiber, though I completely spaced on taking a picture! I plan to give it to a friend's daughter. She discovered spinning at the festival and I am really just a shameless enabler. Don't you know?

At this point, we decided to stop and have a break for lunch. We went to Davila's BBQ, also in Seguin. It was difficult to coordinate with so many people, but eventually everyone did get there. I did not have the presence of mind to snap a photo, which I regret, but hopefully maybe someone else did. It was a lot of fun to see all of the San Antonio area people gathered there. It was a meeting of groups, as well, since we had the San Antonio Fiber Junkies and the LSG folks in the area all together. Fun stuff, I do hope to see these people again because they are awesome and amazing and I LOVE FIBER FOLKS.

After lunch, it was more shopping, of course! I purchased some sock yarn from the Dawning Dreams booth. I was torn and had trouble deciding between this skein and another, more yellow colored one. I decided on this one after a while.

Also, during my ridiculous waiting to decide time I got to see a cute little baby goat. I pet him and he was quite wiggly, hence the blurry picture. Also -- DIAPER! HA!

I also purchased some soap from a booth there run by an etsy store called Mike and Diane . I did not have the presence of mind to take a picture, but I got some soap that smelled like watermelon from them. I am still using it and it is great soap, though. I would recommend it, but my sister does not think so. She is very sensitive about scents, though.

Well, after all of that I went and paid a visit to the major booth of the festival, Windmill Crest Farms. I bought a bag of alpaca fiber. I'm looking forward to spinning it! I am hoping that they will be able to participate in or advertise for Yarn Crawl this year. I'd love to see them again soon! Liz bought some yarn from them. I was a teensy bit jealous until I realized I was going to be able to make my own out of this. Pretty excited about it. The fiber is ridiculously soft.

Then, I found the next booth over or so that was selling llama fiber from Stalter's Farm. I should have put it together when the douchey llama outside was shorn, but I didn't and was surprised to figure out that llama fiber is, in fact a thing. Anyway, it's very soft and amazing and so I bought some of it, as well. It's a pretty natural gray color and I am really looking forward to spinning it. Their website has no mention of llamas, but they were really awesome, amazing people and they came quite a way to get to the festival, so I would not hesitate to buy from them again should I see them. They also gave me a little freebie with the fiber purchase, of both llama and alpaca. I have shamelessly spun up the brown llama, so I will post a picture of that as well. It came out pretty soft and I love the way it spins.

Last, but certainly NOT least, are my favorite people to run into at fiber festivals. Andrea and Emily. They are from the Austin area and are serious enablers with a great attitude. Emily owns a shop called Buena Suerte. I have purchased yarn from her in the past and it is absolutely lovely. This time, I bought two skeins of her Jinx yarn:

She has another type of yarn, called Charm, which is a blend of merino and tencel and it is absolutely fabulous. I did not buy a skein this time around, but I had one that I haven't caked up from Kid 'n' Ewe. The sunlight was pretty weak at the time of the picture taking, but it is incredibly shiny!

I also purchased fiber from Andrea, her shop is Natural Obsessions. She has such amazingly bright, eye-catching dyes it took me forever to decide what to get. Emily suggested I try spinning a wool called targhee because I have had some problems here and there with merino due to the short staple length. It's absolutely gorgeous and I've already started to spin it. I have one single already done, just need to spin up the other half and ply!

I am thinking it will probably spin up to be my best yet and I absolutely love it. Andrea also has a fiber club going on and that looks amazing. I can't sign up for it this time around, but I will keep an eye out for the next one if she does it and  I will be the first one jumping onto that, I can assure you!

All in all, Yellow Rose was amazing and I can't wait until next year. So, I will leave you with a picture of all of my purchasing glory in TWO bags, one of which I had to buy because my poor knitting bag was too full. Ridiculous, aren't I?