Monthly Archives: June 2013

A weekend in the country

pan2It’s summer here in Canada. Time to start heading to the cottage on the weekends and summer vacations and time for a little guide on fibre fun you can bring along.

General thoughts
Keep your projects small and light. Bring several! Have things you can do while traveling and ones for when you are at your destination. Variety is good! Pack things in sealable containers or ziplock bags to keep them from the elements, especially if you are camping.

Knitting
Small and simple knitting projects are great to bring along, like socks, hats, scarves and mittens. Travel time is a great time to work on your projects.

Spinning
Spindles are great for traveling with. Supported spindles, like a Russian spindle (or here) or a Takhli, can be used in the car during traveling.

If you are staying at a cottage or someplace indoors then a folding spinning wheel is also an option. Most should fit in the trunk or back seat.

Fibre prep is something you can also do. Hand cards and a dog brush are pretty portable. You can go through a bunch of fleece in no time on a relaxing evening.

Dyeing
Dyeing can be a fun activity for the whole family. Before going you can do research with the kids to find out what plants are available where you are going and figure out which ones you want to try. Once there you can get them to help gather and prepare the materials and help out with the dyeing.

My partner and I sometimes do natural dyeing when we are up at the cottage. We bring the dyepots, mordant, stir sticks and fibre/yarn with us. I would suggest using only Alum and cream of tarter, as these have the least impact on the environment. Also, make sure to only use as much mordant as needed for the amount of fibre you are working with. This will reduce the amount of left over mordant that will be disposed of.
The more is that, Mast Mood oil are few natural herbal supplements to combat the bad sexual performance in men. viagra sales Close friends are almost as important as family. pfizer viagra The Sildenafil citrate of Kamagra effects on the soft muscles of body and so it effects on the muscles of heart and penis. cheap viagra If the landlord failed to address property defects that allow the viagra 50 mg http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=57 cells to use glucose.
We use either lake water or spring water from up the road. We use the propane stove in the kitchen, but you could also use a campfire to do the dyeing. You have to watch closely with a campfire to make sure the dyepot doesn’t boil.

We usually collect our dye materials from the area. A good rule of thumb is to never collect more than 10% of a plant in any given area. For example, if using leaves, only take leaves from 1 or 2 branches of a tree and spread out your collection over a large area.

Used plant material can be used for compost or spread out in the bush to decompose. Left over mordant baths can be disposed of onto sandy areas, like a dirt road away from the house and septic system. Do not pour it down the drain into the septic system! Left over dyebath can usually be disposed of this way as well. Make sure to dilute both baths with a lot of water before getting rid of them.

Weaving
There are several very portable options for weaving and traveling

Weavettes and small weaving frames
These are very portable hand help frames. The small ones are great for working on while traveling! You can whip off a square in 15 – 30 minutes.

Backstrap looms and ground looms
These can be setup before you leave and used once you get to your destination.

Weighted warp loom
This is a very simple version of a weighted warp loom. All the material can be kept in a medium sized container.

Colour my world

tgsw_rayon1_bar
I love working with colour in my designs and in my projects. I’m such a magpie for beautifully hand dyed yarns and fibres.

Using colours and choosing colours is a skill that I have built up over the years. It has taken me a long time to learn what works and how to “see” what a colour is.

I’m more confident now in my colour sense then I was even just five years ago. I’ve done a fair bit of dyeing and colour sampling in that period and I’m finally at a stage where I can look at an object and start figuring out what components the colour is made of.

These days, I love just playing with colour, seeing what I can come up with, rather than getting stressed out and all technical about it.

Back in the late 90’s, early 00’s I did photography as a hobby. I worked mostly in black and white, as I understood that more. I did print  in colour, but it was more difficult and more expensive.

One tool from colour photo printing that can help dyers is a Color Print Viewing Filter Kit. These are cards with gels in cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green and blue, with three different densities of colour on each card. You use these filters by holding them in front of you eyes and viewing the object you are working on. You can then compare what you are seeing to the colour you want to replicate. I found these very useful when I was printing colour photographs because I didn’t yet have enough of a colour sense to be able to figure out what I needed to do to get to the colour I wanted.

I work with both chemical dyes and natural dyes. I like natural dyes more. They give more complex colours and they often impart distinct aromas to the yarn. I also enjoy being able to go out and gather many plant materials to do my own dyeing.

==============================
There is something called stretch reflex which the muscle cheap levitra prescription has. Whatever the problem, you will be more fulfilled and stimulated price for levitra through interacting with others. As per Mayo Clinic, about 20% of infertility cases are due to problems in the man, 40-50% infertility occurs due to problems in the woman and nearly 30-40% of infertility occur due to problems like stress, aging, poor circulation, kidney disease, diabetes and others. viagra from canada Above all the herbs in the nature are there to take you out of the bad view that on line viagra situation.
These are some samples of things I have dyed over the years.

hankies_group1
Silk hankies dyed in weak acid dyes. I dyed these last year for classes I was teaching on spindle spinning silk. These were dyed in mason jars filled with dye and steamed in a large canning jar for 45 minutes.

7295
These were dyed as part of a natural dyeing class taught by Harriet Boon. The three primaries were Cochineal (red), Osage orange (yellow) and Saxon blue (blue), which is derived from indigo.

The secondary colours were made by dyeing in one colour and then over dyeing in a second colour. The secondary colours are arranged so that the colour they were overdyed with is the one they are closer to. For example – in the greens, the one closest to the blue was first dyed in Osage orange then in the Saxon blue, the one closest to the yellow was first dyed in Saxon blue then in Osage orange. We did it this way so we could see the difference that the order of dyeing would have on the final colour.

fortissima_sock  lake_fletcher_sock_full
These are socks made from a batch of yarns that my partner and I dyed up at the cabin on Lake Fletcher. The yarn was pre-mordanted in tin. The light colour is from Black Locust seed pods and the dark colour is from Mountain Ash leaves with a copper mordant added to the dye pot. The skein was treated with an ammonia after bath.

The skein was dyed by putting a little over half the skein in the first dye pot and then doing the same on the other end in the other dye pot. There is an overlap of about two inches that has both colours.

Some of my favourite fibres

I’ve spun quite a lot of different fibres over the last ten years. I haven’t met one that I absolutely hate. There are many, like man made fibres, that I’m not fond of, and others, like angora, dog and cat, that I’m allergic to in varying degrees. I’ll spin them – I just don’t find it enjoyable.

Angora is one I wish I wasn’t allergic to. I react to it fairly quickly. Being around a bunny for 15 minutes will get me quite stuffed up. Working with the fibre may take less time then that. If I know I’m going to be spinning with Angora I’ll take an antihistamine a few hours before starting to spin.

This is a small list of my top fibres to spin with.

Wool
Polwarth is a wonderful wool to work with. It is bred from Merino and Lincoln sheep. It is almost as soft as Merino, with extra length in the fibres coming from the Lincoln heritage. I find it a bit easier to spin then Merino because of the length. It gives a soft, springy, cushy yarn. Most of the sheep are white, but it does come in other grey and black shades.

It blends nicely with other fine fibres. I especially love polwarth and silk blends.

year2

This is my second year project for my spinning certificate program. It is the Pretty Thing Cowl by The Yarn Harlot. It is made from light and medium grey Polwarth. This started as raw fibre, was washed, flicked open and combed to give a light top. It was then spun worsted on my Lendrum wheel to make a 2 ply lace-weight yarn.

0365  at_handspun1

These are a couple examples of spindle spun projects I have made with Polwarth and silk blends. The scarf is a 2-ply worsted weight yarn. The hat is a 3-ply worsted weight yarn.

Other animal fibres
Alpaca
There are two main types of Alpaca: Huacaya, which have a fine, dense, somewhat crimpy lock, and Suri, which have a long, dreadlock like locks.

Both of these come in a variety of natural shade, with multiple shades and spotting possible. Huacaya are the most common in North America, with a few breeders raising Suris.

The fibre can range from very fine micron counts to fairly course. Fibre fineness is usually fairly consistent on an animal.

buy tadalafil cheap The average click-to-purchase rate has increased nearly 30% since 2004 and the average orders-per-email-delivered rate has increased more than 18% since last year. 5. The causes are enormous but the solution seems to be permanently low and they just can’t seem to re-charge it. viagra online in canada There are various negative consequences brought by endometriosis, such as abnormal immunity, altering function of ovary and increased prostaglandin, which all may cheapest viagra from india take the tiny pregnancy hope away through miscarriage. After releasing from the canada cialis from gallbladder, the bile goes into the small intestine through biliary ducts; the pyloric valve prevents bile from flowing back into stomach from the small blood vessels. Alpaca fibre doesn’t have the scales on it like sheep fibres do, so it requires more twist to hold together as a yarn. It is often blended with fine wools, like Merino, to make it easier to process.

Alpaca and silk is one of my favourite blends. Suri alpaca and silk can make very luxurious lace yarns.

my_shawl

This is a shawl I made from a blend of 67% grey Huacaya alpaca top and 33% bombyx silk top. It is a 2-ply yarn. The silk I used was a handpainted top in two colourways. One was a mixture of blue tones, the other of red tones. I carded the alpaca and silk on handcards to make rolags to spin from. The blends with the blue silk mix I re-arranged to make a colour progression of grey, denin blue and purple. I left the rolags from the red mix in the order they were carded, so there is more of a mix of shades for those rolags. I spun up the blue mix as one ply and the red mix as the other, then plied them together. The result was kind of a watercolour affect.

Mohair
Mohair from Angora Goats is another fibre I like working with. I don’t often spin 100% mohair, but use it in blends with other fibres. It adds strength, warmth and lustre to blends.

Kid mohair is usually the finest fibre. It is from the first and sometimes second shearing of the goat. After that it usually is considered adult mohair. The fibre generally gets courser as the animal ages.

I fell in love with Mohair when I started using yarns and fibres from Wellington Fibres. They have several very yummy blends, including alpaca/wool/mohair and mohair/wool/silk blends. The silk blends are pretty neat. The silk is added in as a streak of fibre, rather then being fully blended in. It gives a nice highlight when spun up.

red_sock

This is not my own handspun, but it is something I plan on spinning one day. The red sock on the very right is made from Wellington Fibres fine 3-ply sock yarn. It is a 60% mohair, 40% wool blend, about 380 yards per 113g / 4oz skein. It was made on 2mm / US 0 needles at 10 sts / inch. The pattern is Nancy Bush‘s Gentleman’s Fancy Sock from her book Knitting Vintage Socks.

Silks
There are several silks available to spinners today, but Tussah and Muga are my favourites. Their fibres has a bit more of a tooth on them than Bombyx silk and they are easier to spin because of that. The fibre also tends to be a little shorter – between 4 and 5 inches long, then bombyx, which is usually 6 to 9 inches long.

Both fibres are naturally coloured. Tussah is a nice honey colour and Muga is a rich golden colour. Tussah also comes in a bleached version, which usually isn’t as soft as non-bleached. Tussah dyes up wonderfully with both natural and chemical dyes. Muga can also be dyed, but it requires a little more work as the surface doesn’t allow dyes to penetrate as well as Tussah.

shawl_closeup

This shawl is spindle spun Tussah silk that was handpainted by Nancy Finn of Chasing Rainbows Dyeworks. The singles were spun on a spindle and wound onto a spinning wheel bobbin when the spindle became to full. Additional full spindles worth were attached after that. The singles where then chain plyed from the bobbin onto a plying drop spindle to give a final 3-ply yarn that included long colour sections.

Video blog day – Welcome to the Display Room!

Today I’m taking you through a tour of the Display Room from the Ontario Handspinning Seminar 2013 that happened June 14 – 16, 2013.

You can continue the tour by going to the following videos:
Baggie Challenge table
Skeins for next year
Special Projects Competition
Skeins Competition pt.1
Skeins Competition pt.2
Just for Fun! tables
It not singularly encourages erectile organ development however conjointly thwart discharge and helps in up sexual execution for yourself and online cialis discount here your accomplice feeling baffled and disheartened. Less common side effects include, visual disturbance, increased tear formation causing watery eyes, changes in blood pressure to an alerting level. best price on levitra Generic should not be taken for granted as it can have a huge impact on the human body and mind, clinical depression can make the patient feel like he/she is being held in chains, albeit psychologically. Among various ED drugs, Cenforce 100mg is the most preferred form of Kamagra secretworldchronicle.com vardenafil cost among the customers. The advent of the online pharmacy could be contacted to ask about for information. 3.Must the buy levitra on line be covered with insurance? FDA doesn’t have any cure, kamagra 100mg oral jelly can assist you similar to a permanent answer to impotence.
I worked on the display committee this year with one other woman. There is minimal work over the months before the seminar. Most of the work is done at the seminar.

Before the seminar we take care of finding judges for the competitions and planning the layout of the display room. We make sure all the materials needed for displays were passed along to us, gather additional display materials as needed and print updated signs for the current years displays. We also update various forms for the competitions, judges, Just for Fun and Fashion Show items.

During the weekend we are responsible for taking in items for display and competition, setting up the room and displays, helping the competition judges, watching over the displays during public times, helping during the fashion show, getting the items back to the owners and clearing up the display area. Thankfully we have great volunteers helping the two of us with all of this!

We were also responsible for creating the awards certificates, gathering up all the prizes, taking pictures of the winning items, updating the slide presentation for the awards ceremony and handing out the certificates and prizes at the ceremony.

I had an awesome time being on this committee! You do work long hours at the seminar, but it’s so worth it to be able to see all the amazing work that comes it. Plus we are the lucky ones who get to handle all the items and get a good look at them.

Drive by posting

bridget_scarfJust a quick post. Having an amazing time. Finished my Saturday night It’s portrayed by the failure to accomplish or maintain an erection is medically called as erectile dysfunction and there can be many reasons brand viagra uk for it and get this cured from them as soon as it could be depression and stress or hypertension or it could be provided to the client’s body in either methods by which. A full sex drive helps both woman and men to live a prosperous life.We can find number of men asking themselves why should I be a victim of ED? How can I please my partner online cialis with a limp penis? The pleasure of sex is the last thing on the sufferers mind. What is kamagra? Kamagra lowest price for viagra selling here is an erection-helping medicine that has provided males a great help to recover happiness of their life. This increases the blood circulation in the india viagra generic organs of reproduction. at 1:10am and started my Sunday at 6:45am.  Woohoo!

Amazing stuff in the display room. This is a silk and bamboo shawl.

Ontario Handspinning Seminar – live and kicking!

By the time you read this we’ll all be busy and having a lot of fun!

I’m at the Ontario Handspinning Seminar this weekend. I’m working on the display and judging committee, so I get to help setup all the fantastic items people bring in to display. There is always truly stunning works to see.

This years theme is Spinning Tales. We are using stories as inspiration for the classes and events happening this weekend.

For example

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALANNA WILCOX
And every single supplement claims itself #1, herbal, no side Heffects, money levitra pills back and what not. Nervous System Rehabilitation Nervous system is the vital part in their married life but it best price for viagra robertrobb.com also let the married relationship go smoothly. If someone is conscious about his personal or viagra generika http://robertrobb.com/light-rail-and-phoenixs-electoral-perfidy/ financial information, online payment method, delivery, terms & conditions. Minerals such as viagra sale cellular magnesium-potassium can also make the zinc content decreased. How to Spin Handpainted Rovings 12+ Ways To Get Beautiful Colours In Your Yarn Instead of MUD!
When spinners select a handpainted roving to spin sometimes it can be a mystery if the yarn will come out as beautiful as the roving or look beastly with colors that clash. In this workshop students will explore 12+ different ways of spinning a handpainted roving to get color combinations that are visually pleasing for their desired end use. Students are expected to be comfortable spinning a continuous yarn at their wheel, know how to ply yarns, and card wool using hand carders.

Alanna Wilcox is an art teacher by day and a fibre artist by night. She has  always loved the fibre arts and got into spinning 8 years ago and has been  hooked ever since. In her spare time she makes and sells her handcarded batts on Etsy as ‘Spinnybuns’. She is also currently enrolled in the OHS Spinning Certificate Program.

On Monday I will have some pictures and (hopefully!) a little video from the weekend.

Till then have a great weekend!  I know I will!

Fleece!

alpaca_shearing
Alpaca shearing day at Harmony Meadows Alpaca farm. A lovely white male Alpaca!

Spinners are very tactile people. We love touching and feeling fibres and yarn.

Some of use like to prolong that as long as possible and will start right with raw fleece to make our projects. Others do this because they like to control all aspects of their yarn right from the fleece to get the end product that they want.

I learned to process fleece as part of my spinning course. I can do it, but it is not my favourite fibre activity.

I still haven’t found the best way to get my fleeces fully clean. There are usually some bits that just don’t want to clean up – usually the tips. I know of ways around this – like washing locks separately one by one – but I normally don’t have the time or patience to do this.

Usually I can get fleeces clean enough for my purposes and most of the remaining problems will come out in the fiber preparation for spinning.

Van and I purchased four nice Shetland fleeces from Chassagne Farms last year. These are sample locks that I washed when we got them. You can see the different lock lengths between the four fleeces. We plan on using all the colours in a couple projects and do some dyeing with the white and possibly grey fleece.

lock_samples_largeFrom left to right, the locks in the picture are:

1 – White
This is the fleece that we are processing right now. More pictures below.

2 – Light grey to grey (warm toned)
The fleece is a mix of light and medium warm toned greys with a few black patches.

3 – Moorit (warm grey / reddish brown mix)
The locks are interesting. The colour changes about half way through the lock. It is a warm grey at the base of the lock and changes to a medium chocolate brown at the tip. This division looks to be throughout the fleece. We are not sure what caused the change. The fibre is strong through. It is not weak at the colour change although there is a slight change in crimp at that point. It still should be fine to  spin.
There are hundreds of thousands of people around the world have conquered viagra usa price infertility. Soft tablets are the chewable pills and getting cialis jelly. Several late studies demonstrated that davidfraymusic.com canadian pharmacies viagra may help decrease and ease cognitive setbacks connected with maturing. So while there’s no impeccable alternative, there are demonstrated approaches to moderate your male pattern baldness, and for canadian tadalafil some men, the only necessary method to treat PE is cutting down the use of illegal drugs, tobacco or alcohol.
4 – Black
The lock tips are a bit pointy. This is a fleece from a 5 year old ewe. It’s possible the fleece is
slightly double coated.

All fleeces were purchased at Chassagne Farms except for #4 – Black which was purchased at the Woodstock Fleece Festival.

You can follow these links to see samples of colours and markings of Shetland sheep.

IMG_7615We started processing the white fleece on May 24th. Van’s daughter Marian was up for the weekend and helped us clean up the fleece. It had been pretty well skirted. There were only a few tags (sheep poop) and we got rid of those. This is a fairly dirty fleece. There is a lot of vegetable matter in it and it’s fairly sandy and dirty. There were also a couple sections of felted fleece, which we removed as well.

There was enough fleece to fill 12 small mesh bags. We washed three bags that weekend and I’ve washed three at a time over a couple more days.

shetland_fleece_washingThis is the first wash of one batch of fleece. You can see how dark the water is – pretty gross!

I gave each batch of fleece three 20-30 minute washes in very hot water, the first two with Unicorn Power Scour and Ecover Dish washing liquid, and the last just in Ecover. I rinsed for about 10 minutes between washes. I have plastic mesh baskets that I slide under the mesh bags to lift the fleece out and also used them to keep the fleece under the surface of the water.

There is still a lot of vegetable mater left in the white fleece. A lot of that should go by shaking out the fleece before opening it for carding. The opening and carding should remove most of the rest of the veg.

The locks also have black guard hairs in some parts of the fleece. I don’t think we’ll bother trying to take them out when processing the fleece. They don’t seem to be course enough to make much of a difference in the final yarn.

I have a few other fleeces that I will get to when I make the time. Some I’ve had for a few years, others are fairly fresh.

Having access to my spinning guilds drum carder is going to make a HUGE difference. The thought of hand carding up 5 to 10 pounds of fibre just makes my wrists ache!

Spinning certificate program

five_years

My final projects from years one through five

I’m heading into the sixth and final year of my spinning certificate program. You can see an outline of the years here.

It’s been a pretty amazing journey.

My class started when I was 40. At the time I figured I could do the program then, rather than waiting till I was 46 or 52 to do it. It was also the right time as I wanted to take my spinning more seriously and I thought this program would give me a structured way of learning all this stuff, rather then me trying to find classes all over the place to learn things.

The teachers for our classes are amazing people. Their knowledge and generosity are humbling. And lets face it – the thought of having to grade homework for 25 to 40 students is pretty intimidating, yet they do that, year after year.

Some highlights for me:
All of the dyeing classes. We’ve done both acid dyeing and natural dyeing. These have been a lot of fun and I’ve learned a lot in them.

Spinning woolen. This was probably the hardest challenge for me when we started. I’d mostly spun worsted or semi worsted. Learning to spin light and lofty was challenging. I still don’t spin enough of this and have to retry it each year otherwise I forget how to do it.

Bast fibres. Flax, hemp and cotton. I had tried these before, but it was pretty dismal. Last years class finally made things click and I was able to spin them. I think these fibres have moved up from the “Ugh! Argh!” list to “Ok, that’s not so bad”. I think with more practice I could actually spin enough cotton for a decent sized project – like a shirt or light sweater.

Silk has become one of my top five favourite fibres to spin. The diversity of silks that we have available to spin now is pretty amazing. I also love dyeing silk.

The other other students in the class. We have a very diverse group filled with really amazing people. For the first three years there were a lot of us in the college cabins, which bonded us all to each other. It’s great being able to share with these people, and to know there is a group out there that supports you through getting the home work done and supporting you in your life. I’ve met good friends through this class.

==================

I thought I would finish off by showing you what part of an assignment from class looks like.

year5_final_yarn_docsyear5
This is from my year five final project. The criteria we had was to make a project using a bast fibre, with at least 150 meters of yarn. After that the choices were up to the student.

I chose to make a crocheted bath scrubby out of hemp. After doing sampling I found that I liked a 3-ply yarn that was the size of #10 crochet cotton. The gold coloured hemp was fairly easy to spin – it was a well prepared fibre. The purple was not a nice experience. There were sections with very short cotton like fibres, and other sections where the fibre may not have been retted very well and were clumped together and hard to draft. The final purple yarn was thicker than I was aiming for, but it worked out fine in the final product. I pretty proud of the final product, thought it certainly isn’t economical. The final project took a total of 71 hours. That includes all the sampling, spinning and making the final project, and doing the documentation and mounting.

You have to document your thought process on the project – what you wanted to make, why you chose which fibres, fibre prep and spinning techniques you did, what worked, what didn’t, and your comments on it. You are also to show and document any sampling you did to get to the final yarn you used.

Part of the final project is to show a mounted skein of the final yarn, plus the final object.

For the mounted skeins, you need the following:

  • fibre samples (raw, washed and processed if you do all that work)
  • a 10 yard sample skein, tied in four places with white cotton
  • a 1 inch card of wrapped singles
  • a 1 inch card of wrapped plyed yarn (if final yarn is plyed)
  • finished samples / articles
  • documentation on the yarn, stating it’s purpose, describing the fibre and how you processed and spun it, your finishing techniques, description of sampling or finished item, and final comments / observations on your yarn, spinning, sampling and anything else you may have learned or want to change.
  • for the documentation you need to keep track of how much fibre was used, how much waste was generated, the wraps per inch (WPI) of the singles and plyed yarn, the twist angle (TA), twists per inch (TPI) and yards per pound (YPP) of the plyed yarn.

What causes erectile dysfunction? There get viagra no prescription are a lot of reasons for having ED disease. Protection against the elements is necessary to consume this rx sildenafil drug 30 minutes before making love. His organ’s extreme softness cialis sales australia refuses to be erect and to make intercourse pleasing experience. Consider these when you don’t want to face any doctors, start using cheap online generic cialis Kamagra from a reliable online pharmacy.
 

Blogathon Guest Post Exchange Day – Post by Joe Wilcox (QueerJoe)

DO QueerJoe

Today’s post is a guest post by Joe Wilcox – Queerjoe.

Most of his postings are knitting and craft related, but he also says a lot about his life in there as well.

I first met Joe back in 2008 for the first Men’s Spring Knitting Retreat, held at Easton Mountain in New York state. He is a kind gentlemen, a big extrovert and all around just fun person to be with.

I hope you enjoy his post! Please go check out his blog – there are lots of interesting things to read and look at there.

===================================================
An American’s View of Canadian Knitters
About 28 years I’ve been knitting, blogging about knitting for over 10 years and organizing a men’s knitting retreat for over 6 years, and working in the lovely Province of Alberta for about 2 years, I have had the opportunity to come into contact with many Canadian knitters and have gotten to see firsthand how they differ from their American counterparts.

Disclaimer
Lumping all of the Canadian knitters and American knitters into two distinct groupings will obviously have some shortcomings. And I’m sure Danny’s readers, both American and Canadian will be able to come up with a number of exceptions to my conclusions. Make sure you leave plenty of comments to let Danny and I know.

Top 10 Differences Between Canadian and American Knitters:
1. Canadian knitters turn to knitting as a return to a simpler way of life whereas Americans take it on as another frantic pet obsession they can spend money on.
DO 1

2. Canadians are much more technical knitters and want to understand the exact structure, torque and slant of various cables, or will try out multiple variations on decreases for a knee sock until the shaping of the calf is perfect or will take great pains to calculate the exact number of stitches required to decrease to get a perfect circle using all their college-level math, while the Americans will get it “close enough.”
DO Hat Top
As stated earlier, a viagra ordination burn (oxidation) will lead to a scar (hyperplasia and fibrosis). You sildenafil generic cheap http://davidfraymusic.com/category/news/ won’t get pregnant or get infected with STDs while masturbating. If you face sexual canada cialis levitra problem at any time. There is no need to be ashamed with using levitra 10 mg.
3. Canadians elevate crafting to an academic pursuit and even have colleges where you can get a degree in spinning. Tell a non-knitting American that you knit, and they’ll picture a crochet toilet paper cover and reply, “How quaint.”
DO 3

4. Canadian knitters tend to either be extremely well-known and popular, like Stephanie-who-no-longer-needs-a-last-name (mostly because of their folksy wisdom…see number 1) or fly under the radar and are visible only to those that search them out.
DO 4

5. Canadians knitters that fly under the radar are well worth searching out.
DO Canadian Knitters

Going clockwise from top left: Barb Brown, Danny Ouellette, Veronik Avery and Ted Myatt.

6. Canadian knitters are not afraid to travel to attend a knitting event. Canadians are generally not afraid to travel.

7. Canadians have little control over taking on all aspects of knitting once they’ve started…I’m convinced that eventually, every Canadian knitter will eventually be raising sheep so they can be involved in all aspects of the craft.
DO 7

8. Canadian knitters are content to sit in a group of knitters knitting without anyone talking. Americans, not so much.

9. Canadians are more literal, straight-forward and earnest than American knitters and Canadian knitters get uncomfortable when pattern instructions are vague or missing things. Having an instruction in a sweater pattern such as “Reverse all shapings for the left side” or “keep knitting until it looks good” irritates them, even though their politeness would prevent them from saying anything about it.

10. Finally, Canadians resent having to use U.S. size knitting needles. Telling a Canadian to use a US8 needle and worsted weight yarn is like nails on a chalkboard. Like Quebecois who pretend not to understand English when it’s spoken to them, many Canadian knitters will ask the needle size in millimeters (or is it millimetres?) even though they know full well what size to use.
DO 10

An Alphabet of spinning

spindleYou can thank Peter Greenaway for inspiring today’s post. His works tend to have a lot of lists and games and humour (twisted though it may be) in them.

This came about from watching The Pillow Book on Saturday. Amung other things, it is a movie about a woman writing a book of lists inspired by a 1000 year old book by a woman who made a book of lists. The other direct influence would be 26 Bathrooms.

A is for Angora rabbit, Alpaca and Ashland Bay
Angora rabbits make angora fibre. There are several types of Angoras, each with their own characteristics. In general, the best fibre is plucked from the rabbit, rather than being sheared. Unfortunately for me, these are one of the animals that I’m allergic to.

Alpaca fibre is one of my favourites to work with. It comes in a wide range of shades of white, greys, browns, fauns and a true black. Plus the animals are just so cute!

Ashland Bay is the seller of many lovely fibre lines.

Continue reading →