The Easter bunny wears fur?

So, true story.  Friday night is pizza and movie night around here.  I was sitting on the couch, watching a movie with Rick and the girls, when I thought I dropped something.  I reached under the couch to see if I had, and came up with...an egg.  Which I found rather surprising, since we were in the den, and the chickens, so far as I know, do not come into the house to lay eggs.  I chalked it up to general weirdness and went on watching.  (Upon re-reading this prior to hitting publish, it occurs to me to wonder what that says about the general state of weirdness in our household.) 

The next morning, Rick came into the living room, holding up another egg.  He'd found it at the foot of the bed, on the floor.

I should be clear here - I'm talking about raw eggs.  Not hard-boiled eggs, not Easter eggs, not chocolate eggs (alas).  Chicken eggs, of the sort our chickens lay.

Fifteen minutes after Rick had announced his discovery, I heard dog paws clickety-clacketying down the hall, and then heard a rather hollow-sounding plonk at my side.  I looked down to see (you guessed it): an egg.  And a very pleased-looking Mathilda.  Who apparently is under the mistaken impression that she is the Easter bunny.

We haven't had any more special deliveries since then (although, given the under-the-couch egg, I am wondering where and in what state I will find other such "gifts" that I haven't noticed yet).  Our best guess is that some of the chickens have stopped laying in the coop (for a while, some of them were very attached to a nest on the side of the house, but then they all figured it out) because one of the chickens has gone broody, and persists in sitting in the nesting box all day, if allowed, making cranky noises at anyone who comes to bother her.  I'm guessing that the other hens find it easier to just lay elsewhere, and Tilly wanted to make sure that we weren't missing anything.  Never a dull moment around here!

In fiber-related news, I finished my first "real" weaving project.  Realizing that I don't wear long rectangular scarves, generally, I knew that I'd need to think of something else to focus my weaving attention on.  So I decided to try napkins. 

For a first-time experiment, they didn't turn out badly.  They are narrower than I'd hoped, as I warped the loom to an 90-inch warp (hoping to weave four 20-inch napkins that were 10 inches wide), using my new 10-dent heddle and a very nice linen warp (FibraNatura Flax).  Alas, the 250 meters that I had wasn't enough, so I ended up about an inch and a half shy of the width I'd wanted.

The weft yarn is Plymouth Grass (a 65% cotton/35% hemp yarn).  I tried a couple of new things on this project, for fun.  I hemstitched each end of the napkins as I came to them (a 2x2 hemstitch).

You can kind of see it there.  Now, I am not fond of fringes in my linens, so I trimmed two of the napkins off very close to the hemstitch (still need to do a bit more neatening up), and left two a bit longer, to see how they wear.  Any weavers out there want to tell me the best way to finish edges so that they look neat and have no fringe at all?

In the main part of each napkin, I started with leno (alternating 2x2)(you can see it more closely below), and then played around with weft floats using a pick-up stick for the rest of each napkin.

I finished them by washing and drying them.  They turned out, as I said, smaller than I'd wanted, but very absorbent and soft and cushy.  So I consider them to be a reasonable success for a first time out.

I immediately trucked off to my LYS to get more yarn for more napkins.  This time I ended up with a linen warp (Habu, L25/3 linen, 331 meters)(this is a finer-weight yarn than the FibraNatura, so we'll see how that works), and a blended warp (Plymouth Linen Concerto 48% rayon/42% linen/10% cotton; this is the yarn I used for the weft of the scarf that was my first project).

What you see there is the loom, dressed after two attempts.  The first time, thinking I'd have enough warp yarn for a longer warp, I went for it, only to find, about an inch and a half shy of my total 10-inch width, that I was out of warp yarn.  So I unwarped the loom, which, it turns out, was not as easy as I'd hoped.  I persevered, however, and rewarped it somewhat shorter, but all the way from one side to the other (hooray!).  I finished the warping and tying on this morning, so this is ready to go.

At the same time, I can't help but think of bigger projects, not to mention stash-busting projects (and more on me and my stash and our recent adventures in the next post).  I think that I want to weave the girls some blankets.  They will, of course, have to be woven in strips, but once I got the idea in my head, it wouldn't go away.  And then I remembered a skein of sock yarn that I got when I was in the Rockin' Sock Club a few years ago - a skein that is not at all my sort of colorway, but that Younger Daughter immediately laid claim to.  It's been waiting for the right time to get out of stash and into a project for her.

Talk about Easter egg colors!  Of course, that's not going to be enough for a blanket, but I also remembered four ounces of gorgeous Falkland fiber, hand-dyed by Erica, that I bought because the braid made me think of Younger Daughter (I now realize why).

Well, surely something can be done with that combination?  I'm thinking of using handspun yarn from that braid as the weft in the middle parts of the blanket, and the sock yarn for the weft at the edges.  But that leaves the warp.  Well, how about that yarn I bought to take the kilt hose class at Sock Summit, but which I haven't used?

Yup.  I think we've got something there.  I spent some time today thinking about maths.

Which rather made my head hurt.  I think I'll have enough of the two weft yarns, but will probably order one more skein of that sock yarn for the warp.  I have time, as I need to spin the Falkland up.  You can see there my sketch of my plan.  This'll be a twin bed size, so about 76" by 48".  I'm thinking three strips of a textured weave in the middle, and then four strips, arranged log cabin style, around the edges, woven in a colorwork pattern.  I have time to work out which while I get through my current napkin project and the kitchen towel project (planned to be a colorwork one) after that.  Once those are done, I think I'll be ready to tackle something bigger.

Meanwhile, I am plugging away at the Northmavine Hoody.  Whilst watching Paris-Roubaix this morning, I finished the second sleeve and got it onto the needle with the body stitches and the first sleeve, and am now working on the raglan decreases.  Little by little.  I keep reminding myself that this is not a project for the faint-of-heart.  Not only does it have lots of finishing details still to come (knitting ribbed bands along the fronts and then picking up and knitting an i-cord bind off all the way around the fronts, hood, and bottom of the sweater, then installing a zipper and knitting pockets), but the number of ends to be woven in are astronomical (four ends per every eight rows; I am not kidding).  I have been taking time at regular intervals to weave ends in so that they're not all waiting for me.  In fact, I believe that the second sleeve and its ends are calling me even as I type. 

So there's the question.  Do I weave?  Get that spinning started?  Weave in ends?  Fold laundry?

Well.  I think we know the answer to that last one.

A theme

I was taking pictures of various things I've been working on, and looking at pictures of some of the non-fiber pursuits I've been engaged in recently, and I think that there's a theme arising.  Let's see if you see it, too.

Maybe?

It's all purple and green around here, apparently.  I've been gazing out of my office window longingly these last few weeks, noting that the ceonothus are in bloom, but unable to get out there to enjoy them.  Last weekend, I took a nice long hike in the hills behind my house, and, as you can see from that top photo, they are blooming away.

And buzzing with bees.  Walking along the path bordered in these bushes is like walking through a giant beehive.  The bees are so focused on the flowers that they almost never actually fly into the path.  I went again this morning, much earlier in the day, and found that bees' alarm clocks must ring later than mine.  It was quiet on the way out, and I got up to the top of the hill to find a lovely view waiting for me.

Mist-covered hills and mountains stretching away to the east.  And back down again in time to catch the sun making it over the big hill I'd just climbed.

By the time I got back down, the bees were hard at work again.  I was relieved. 

There's also green and purple in the latest knitting I've been doing.

This is the body of the Northmavine Hoody, a Kate Davies pattern from her new book, Colours of Shetland, which I absolutely adore.  Totally aside from the patterns (there are quite a few in there that I'd knit), her writing is lovely, and she has essays about each of the places that inspired the patterns in the book.  It's truly a pleasure to read and look at.  The patterns are also well-thought-out, with the kinds of little details that I enjoy seeing in my knitwear - you can see the turned hem in the picture up top, and this pattern has several other details like that, the sort of thing that make it look professional when it's done - handmade, rather than homemade.  As you can see, I have finished the body, and tonight I will cast on for the first sleeve.  I'd love to finish this before the May Grey sets in around here - I think it could get some use.  It's knitted out of Jamieson and Smith 2-ply jumper weight, on size two needles, so it's a lovely weight, and a nice crunchy wool, in colors that I wear all the time (I admit to a total lack of originality on this one - I ordered the yarn used in the pattern, in the colours used in the pattern - but they are so me!).

And then some of you may have noticed that other picture I slipped in there.  What's that, you may ask?  That is the Cricket loom that my mom bought for me and the girls about a year and a half ago.  We wove the yarn included in the package, and then it rather languished.  When my LYS advertised a weaving class, using exactly this rigid heddle loom, I jumped at it.  So yesterday morning I went in and spent a lovely four hours at the store, re-learning how to dress the loom, and getting some good tips for using it.  When I got home, I spent a busy hour reclaiming my front and back patios from the chickens (have I mentioned that five chickens not only produce a good plenty of eggs, they also produce a good plenty of poop?), and trying to devise some way of arranging various patio furniture and cushions so that the chickens will not think that roosting on my patio furniture is a good thing.  (I'm also working on convincing them to return to their coop at night to roost.  They used to, until they discovered the couch on the front patio, so now they need retraining.  Any suggestions?)  Once that was done, I settled down on the back patio under the blooming wisteria (more purple and green, but no photos), listening to the bumblebees bumble about in the flowers, and weaving.  This morning, I wrapped the whole thing up, and got this.

I'm pretty happy with the final result, especially given that it's my first time out, really. 

The warp is a merino/cotton blend, in a solid seafoam green.  The weft is a linen/rayon/cotton blend, variegated (as you can see).  I finished it by washing it in my washer on the wool setting, and then chucking it in the dryer for a bit.  I wanted to soften the linen up, and figured that tightening up the wool a bit wouldn't be a bad thing, and I was right.  It is much more drapey now, and will probably continue to soften up with wear.  As I was weaving, I got curious as to how this would have turned out differently had I switched the warp and weft yarns, so as soon as I was done, I redressed the loom, using the linen/rayon/cotton blend for the warp.  I didn't have much yarn left - really, this second time around is more in the nature of an experiment, and good practice for locking down in my memory how to dress a loom - so this won't be a "real" scarf.  I also realized that the girls had "misplaced" several bits and bobs (read: the clamps for fixing the loom to the table, and the dent hook), but I managed just fine.

A heavy box pinned the loom in place and, in case anyone cares, an orifice hook works nicely as a dent hook.

As I said, this will be half the width of the first one, but I'm plugging along, and it's interesting to see how different the two yarns look when woven the other way around.

I know I'd said I wasn't going to get into weaving - too many fiber sports already.  But I figure a little bit couldn't hurt, right?  And it seems like a great way to start using more of my handspun, not to mention the rest of my stash.  In fact, to that end, I appear to have ordered another heddle, a ten-dent one this time (I don't think I'm quite using my vocabulary correctly; I'll get there), which is more appropriate to weaving the fingering weight yarn that makes up so much of my knitting and spinning stash.  I may also have ordered a stand for the loom and a book with some ideas for rigid heddle loom projects.

Oops.