Monday, September 17, 2007

Classes, day 1, and a choka!

Classes started today. I decided to bring my silver alpaca roving and my new Ashford drop spindle (since my old one sadly died. I bought a new one. It arrived this past Wednesday. Huzzah!). I'm such a bad person, spinning for the attention. But I really like the attention. It gets people to come over and talk to me, and then I can make new friends!

So I started spinning before my German class. Lo, and behold, people noticed. And of course I let the people around me pet my alpaca. They all thought it was really cool. And the girl sitting next to me (I forgot her name, since I'm bad with names. Bad me!) lives in a convent in upstate NY during summers/breaks where they raise Kashmir goats and spin the wool! She herself tried learning on a wheel and had trouble with it. So I showed her how it works on the drop spindle. Maybe she'll buy herself a spindle and I can give her lessons. (And maybe she'll give me some Kashmir roving. That's wishful thinking on my part, though.)

But I've been working a lot on my wheel as well, which is in my room, and the only audience I have for that usually is the cat. So that's proof that I don't only spin for the attention.

In other news, I noticed a blog called Sock Pr0n, where she has regular contests where people have to submit a couplet to Choka on It, a site where they are attempting to write the world's longest Choka. They've probably already succeeded. It's a fun site. And Sock Pr0n's contest goes until September 28th. (For the 1 or 2 hypothetical readers of this blog...)

Hopefully I'll post pictures of things soon. I made a small pouch today for Homespun Helper's sunshine sweets project. My hopes are to make a bunch of items for charity before Yom Kippur, with the thought that one is supposed to be doing teshuva (repentance), tefila (prayer), and tzedakah (charity) during this time period, so I can work on the latter, which is more fun and helps more people anyways.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Knitting in the Divinity School

Today marked the beginning of my orientation for my Master's of Theological Studies program at Harvard Divinity School. I decided to work on a calorimetry headband in green wool. I made the entire thing today!

A lot of people commented on my knitting. I happened to mention spinning in a conversation, and someone said that I should bring my wheel to campus. Unfortunately that isn't so practical. But I might bring the drop spindle, just to show off enlighten people about the wonders of hand-spinning.

And the Div school has a knitting circle of some sort, though I'm having trouble finding information on it. I bet they do a lot of charity knitting, though, since the Div school is full of awesome people who want to save the world.

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

More adventures in plying


I'm still having some trouble getting the wheel to run smoothly when I ply. It kept on stopping for some reason. But I managed to ply this. It's all merino wool. And it was decadent to work with. (Unfortunately I don't get to keep it. That seems to be the norm with everything I create.)

At least I'm getting a lot better at keeping the yarn consistent. Pre-drafting helps a lot.

In other news, I am now in Cambridge. As is my yarn. I have a lot of yarn.

I also learned today that cats are entranced by spinning. My housemate has a psycho cat. Said psycho cat has been hissing at me a lot since I moved in on Sunday. But she was very nice to me when I was spinning, and kept poking her head into my room. And now she's hissing at me less. She's in my room right now, sniffing the wheel and the yarn.

If I get a chance, I might knit her a catnip mouse.