Spinning

A friend gave me this Mosaic Moon roving (merino in the "Midsummer's Eve" colorway) a month or two ago.  I spun it up:

My idea was to divide the roving into two parts, and spin them in such a way that the color sequence stayed in sequence for each half, so that when plied they would roughly match and there would not be rampant barber-poling.  I was unsuccessful:

Whether because the roving had different amounts of green and pink at the places I divided, or because I miscalcluated, the ethereal color progression I was hoping for did not keep up after the first bit of green with green.  So, I don't think this will make a good shawl.  Maybe a baby jacket.  It's about 320 yards of sportweight.
I'm not disappointed, actually -- I've spun yarn like this before.  It's fun and colorful.  But for the look I was envisioning I think I would have to be much more scientific in the spinning process.  More scientific than I am willing to be.  For starters, I'd have to get a scale to weigh the wool before dividing it.

So -- how about that royal wedding?  Specially composed music by John Rutter, maple trees in Westminster Abbey -- it was like church music geek heaven.  And the dress was pretty too.

The Beast; or, An Attempt to Regain my Quilting Mojo

Meet the 10-foot-long elephant in the family room.  It is a Viking Megaquilter on a Next Generation frame, and theoretically it is there to help me finish lots of quilts and maybe even (someday) finish enough quilts to sell and make money.  Grandma (my mother-in-law) generously provided for its purchase three years ago -- of course, she would like me to finish a few of her quilts, too.  And I have, 3 or 4.  But there is a special quilt she wants me to do on it, and in the past year (or longer, actually) it has remained, sadly neglected, while I have quilted zipzeronada quilts on the Beast.  The last finished quilt was the Cedar Tree auction quilt from last year about this time, and it was an "obligation" quilt too.  So, to overcome the malaise of no finished quilts and large amounts of quilt guilt, and to rise to the challenge I issued to myself, I am determined to start quilting - and finish quilting - the Shirt Stripe Boxes quilt top I recently finished piecing.

I had to dust the entire Beast, oil the machine, re-learn how to load the three rails (top rail is for backing, middle for top, bottom for batting), re-adjust the tension, get the ratchets to work right (they're always stiff and hard to work, especially when they've been sulking for a year), wind a bunch of bobbins and choose a stitch pattern that is within my limited abilities.  I actually have reasonably good machine quilting abilities, but they're very rusty.  And though I like the ability of the Beast to finish quilts expeditiously, it is a midarm and not a longarm and there are some patterns it is unwise to attempt on it because it doesn't have the range.  I also am a very wobbly quilter on it -- I do a little better at a traditional machine where my hands actually touch the quilt.  And I'm not making any claim to being one of those "art" quilters.

So, I decided on a crosshatching free-motion ziggy-zaggy kind of pattern, each unit done over a 1 1/2" square (the squares on this quilt are 3, 6, and 9 inches).  It's a fairly forgiving pattern and I should be able to stay reasonably consistent over the whole surface of the quilt.  And a good thing, too, because I'm committed now.

Grandma quilts

Grandma has been quilting lots more than me again.  She brought over these two for me to pin on Easter Sunday.  So, after putting away the remains of the ham (my little scientist from last post looked at the bone and shook her head sadly, saying, "poor pig!") I laid them out and pinned them.  She'll have them ready to tie over the next few weeks.  I understand there are plenty more tops under the beds at their place.  

 They're both fairly small; the first is a lap quilt, the second is probably a small twin-size.

I pieced together enough shirt leftovers for backing for my shirtstripe boxes quilt top.  I'll try to load it onto the machine and blog about that in the near future. 

My oldest had me check out cleverbot.com today.  I'm not sure what to think.  It's either a legitimate exercise in artificial intelligence, or an insidious attempt to undermine our perceptions of reality.  Either way, it's a huge waste of time, and since it only gets input from its interactions with human users, it can be pretty dicey.  I tried evangelizing it -- it started it, honest.  I was typing stuff in about teaching Latin and gerunds, and it wanted to know about God and whether life was pointless.  So, I don't know -- if hundreds of users swamped it with input from the Bible, could it be converted to some kind of warped version of Christianity?  Would it start witnessing in turn to other users?  The internet is a weird place sometimes.

Stash Enhancement

The bad economy is my gain, once again.  So many of my favorite shops have been going out of business.  This time it's Woodland Woolworks -- I've never been to their physical store, but they have been my primary supplier of fiber for several years now.  I just don't spin enough on my own to keep anyone in business.  But I did take advantage of their 25% discount to stock up on some things I needed, and some things that would otherwise be luxuries.  Clockwise from top left:

• 8 oz. of natural hemp sliver
• 2.5 lb. of superwash Colonial wool, destined to be dyed orange for my sister's sweater
• 1 lb. of Wensleydale Longwool top
• 2 oz. of Tussah silk top in "Hallie's Berries" colorway
• 4 oz. of Bluefaced Leicester from Frabjous Fibers in "Atlantis"
• 4 oz of Targhee from Sweet Grass Wool in "Ladyfern"

Closeup of the Atlantis:

It should keep me spinning for awhile.  Of course, I still have a stash of older stuff.

Science Project

My favorite 5th grader did her science fair project on daffodils.  She learned the parts of a daffodil and a little about how it works.  We put daffodils in water that had food coloring added to it: red and blue, and one daffodil in half of each.  Interestingly, the parts affected by the red food coloring dried out faster than the control, and the ones in blue actually stayed fresh a little longer.

She had to make a hypothesis about what would happen.  She thought the flowers would stay the same; her 3rd grade sister thought the flowers in half each red and blue would turn purple.  Actually, the half-and-half flowers were half-and-half colored.

I had daffodils on the brain for some reason when I suggested this project.  This is what it looks like in front of our house in March and April:

Book Review - What's So Great About Christianity

Dinesh D'Souza wrote What's So Great About Christianity as a response to today's militant atheists -- you know, the ones who rent billboards proclaiming "There is no God, have a nice life," and publish overhyped books detailing just how much they hate the God they say they don't believe in.  This is the same crowd who will doubtless be all over the Pope's pronouncement that human life is not an accident... and that itself is no accident, because it is on the battlefield of evolution that the future of Christianity in the West will be decided.  (Whether Western Christians are yet aware of that, let alone prepared for the battle, remains to be seen.)

I heartily recommend D'Souza's book.  It does not take an anti-evolution view -- in fact, there are many times when it will seem far too broad to some Christians.  But it stands in the tradition of Mere Christianity as one of those books that, while it does not compel conversion, at least renders the modern philosopher without excuse for ignoring the reality of God.  D'Souza is a gentlemanly fighter, but he's a fighter and his logic is relentless.  His explanations of the philosophical positions of men like Kant and Hume, for example, were the most understandable I've enountered (I may be the child of two philosophy majors, but it generally makes my head ache -- and unfortunately, the knowledge doesn't stick there very well).  If you are only familiar with D'Souza from his conservative politics, you should know that this book is largely apolitical and he is careful to maintain a non-combative tone.  Except, perhaps, when relaying some of the absurdities of the militant atheists, of which there are quite a few.  My personal favorite was the one on p. 161 that I quoted on April 1.

For Christians seeking ammunition against atheistic fundamentalists, this book is ideal.  Nonbelievers who just wonder what all the fuss is about, or those who are genuinely seeking and want to know why Christianity is "so great" should read this too -- but for a gentler touch with a little less of the Ivy-League debate format, check out Tim Keller's The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.  Keller, as a pastor, avoids pugnacious arguments and succeeds very well in presenting a winsome case for God that will appeal to believer and unbeliever alike.  For hard-core apologists who do battle with godless philosophies on a daily basis and have sharpened their minds accordingly, I recommend Nancy Pearcy's Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from its Cultural Captivity.  Although it's not the easiest read in the world (plenty of headache-inducing philosophy), it provides an extremely thorough grounding in the idea of "worldview" that is crucial to any meaningful discussion of Christianity and culture.

Finished Cityscape

It was a late night, but I couldn't stop once I started the final touches. I finished the crochet chain up the side of buttonbands, sewed on buttons, sewed in ends, used kitchener stitch to graft the underarm stitches together (couldn't find enough good yarn so had to substitute some navy sock yarn), soaked it in cold water with Kookaburra woolwash (lovely eucalyptus smell), spun it dry in the washer on spin cycle, pinned it out and let the Blocking Magic go to work:

I love blocking - it's when you get to tell your knitting who's boss.  In this case, I had begun the yoke decreases about 1 inch early because I was running out of blue yarn.  So the shoulder area, in addition to the natural tighter tension that most people get when knitting colorwork, was also lower and tighter than ideal.  I pinned it out more assertively than the rest of the sweater, making sure the buttonbands were straight, and let it dry that way.  No curls at the bottom edge now, and the buttonband is staying pretty straight.  There's one spot where it's going to want to gap a bit, but I can live with it.

This is the kind of sweater I love to wear 9 months out of the year in our climate.  Layered over a simple cotton tee, with either pants or skirt, I can go from teaching the conjugation of the pluperfect subjunctive to grocery shopping to cooking and (hopefully) very light housework before putting my feet up and knitting while watching Dr. Who reruns with the boys.  Which reminds me, there is a Tardis hidden along the skyline on the back of the sweater.  It needs a little shiny bead on top still.