Of Mabinogi and Plying Yarn

Mabinogi is having an event where you post this somewhere and tell 'em then hope you win.  So here's my random plug:

I've thought about posting what I'm doing in mabi, but I either forget, don't feel like posting, or think 'no one wants to read about that'.  Am I right or would that actually be interesting?  Probably not, running ciar beginner over and over is rather boring.

I finally finished spinning all but two ounces of my white wool.  I decided to ply it yesterday.  Plying is where after you spin it into a string (it doesn't like this at all) you take multiple spun strings or each end of the one you spun (I did the later) and spin them the opposite direction so they wrap around each other and don't keep trying to undo them selves.  To get at the beginning of it I wound it onto something else, part of a cardboard tube, then slid it off. (I almost couldn't)  I was told that it'd be bad if I let implode, so I used my thumb to stop it. It tried to take off my thumb by cutting off my circulation in return.  ._.  Kinda scary, I tried using something else (a sharpie) to stop it, but that fell out.  ><  It turned out not to mean total -doom- but I did end up with a lot of knots to figure out, with it trying to twist on itself the whole time.  I was refering to it with various phrases that tended to include 'gordian knot' (I heard this somewhere and it stuck with me) and 'snarled mass'.

Hmm... anything else... School is actually going well this semester.  I still need to come up with two topics for the web site project for Intro to Web Systems.  I already have an idea of what I could/probably will use, but I kinda wanted to come up with something I haven't done before, but that would still be possible.  Oh well, whatever.

Woo!  I get to go to a fiber store tomorrow! (Today)   I need to go to sleep... Maybe after an episode of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann...  (Squee~ <3)

Of Wool, Spinning, Cats, and Knitting.

I mentioned in my last post (I meant for there to be multiple Arizona posts, but it didn't work out that way, I might still try to put something together later) that I learned how to spin wool into yarn. For Cristmas Eve Eve I got some purple wool, three crochet hooks, and three skeins of yarn. The purple stuff has been tucked away until I run out of the white wool and am a bit better. I've been doing a bit here and there, but not much, and yesterday my spindle kept falling off because I had made it too thin. >< In the long run I'm probably going to end up with quite a bit of really low grade yarn, and thus it will be unsellable. (People actually do hand spin and sell yarn) I'll need to be able to do something with it myself so all my hard work doesn't completely go to waste. Which is what led me to attempt to learn how to knit. With skewers. I don't own any actual knitting needles, so I thought they'd be a good alternative. They've got nearly everything I think a knitting needle needs, wooden, pointy, just missing the ball on the end. I was wrong. I'll still try again some other time, when I'm not tired and I actually feel like digging through them to find ones that wont catch.
One of our cats, Whitey, has really long fluffy fur. (You can see where this is going, right?) My dad was joking about making a sweater out of it. After reading an article in Spin Off (a spinning magazine) about making dog fur yarn, with a pattern to make a cell phone cover shaped like a dog out of it, I decided that somewhere along the line cat fur is going to go into one of my projects. I'll have to wash it really well, considering my allergies. Oh, and you know that cliche about cats and yarn? It's totally true.