Yarnivorous

G'day all! The other day our favourite aunt, Laurie , asked what are you waiting for? What am I waiting for? What *am* I waiting for? Heck, I dunno? What do I want? Umm, to knit and spin yarn (mebbe in the opposite order), to make pretty colours (ie dye yarn), to share the yarny love around (hopefully earning enough to cover costs and buy more stuff to spin and/or dye), ride my bike (simply for the joy of riding rather than to get places like I mostly do at present), to find something that my brain finds challenging and fascinating. (A beautiful CVM fleece from a lovely lady in Colorado - Myrtle of Black Pines Sheep ) Why am I waiting for any of these things? Well the yarn I spun last week is being knitted into a gift so I guess I am doing one of these things. I'm not dyeing yarn at present cos I don't have a lot to dye and I have not worked out a good way to dye the yarn yet as the kitchen in our apartment is teensy and our laundry lacks necessary laundry things (like ...

G'day all! Hopefully we are back online! We have a router that appears to work after significant wrangling (to activate the account you need a windoze box to run IE cos the webpage used to activate the account needs IE cos it uses crippled javascript links and my box has windoze on it but it is Too Old and does not have the Right Network Driver on it and then one of Nathan's friends pointed us to an IE emulator for Linux and it worked!). I am lying on our bed with the laptop on the floor next to the router - how decadent! Man, I've missed you guys! Fingers crossed, hope it keeps working 8-) anon!

G'day all! I am back in the business centre of our apartment complex. Yep, still having to access the net here - our router hasn't arrived and we have no idea if the phone line is on yet, so no DSL for us yet! But we do have a shiny new Dyson . Mmmmm! Plus I got 20% off with a Bed Bath and Beyond voucher. Hooray for BBB 20% off things! I am going to issue a challenge for all of you in the northern hemisphere who have bikes or who used to ride a bike but don't have one at the moment. Stay tuned for details. I reckon you can guess what the challenge will be since summer is y-comin in. Especially when I show you pics of my recent cycling exploits. Hopefully tomorrow we will be online, only a day late but I'd better not hold my breath and nor should you. There will be knitting related stuff soon too. anon!

G'day all! Half of the country is still under snow and us? We are battling FLEAS and MOSQUITOES. Yep, had to yell that cos last night was one of the most miserable of my life. Something bit me on the foot, y'see, and it was itchy and I could not sleep. Then another bit started itching and well it was all downhill from there. I ended up taking an antihistamine but I lost about three hours sleep simply cos something was enjoying my blood or I had some weird food allergy that meant my foot itched miserably. I favour the first explanation since the lumps looked like mossie bites. Then when I did crawl back into bed, it was getting light and I was very cold and ended up overheating after heaping my new quilt over me (my Very Hungry Caterpillar quilt :-). And we have fleas. Yep. Fleas. Mongrel things. Not many fleas but enough to make me itch like crazy. My skin has gone hypersensitive so anything that pierces it or simply rubs/bumps it makes an itchy patch. I have flea ...

G'day all! I hope that this really is the last Stitches stash post. I forgot to write this one up offline. Lisa Souza's dyeing. Purdy! Sock yarn and Blue Faced Leicester fibre to spin up. Yum! anon!

G'day all! I hope this is the last in our little series of flaunting my new stash. I feel a tad embarrassed but I have a LOT less than some of the ladies I saw walking out the door (though they mostly said that they only had the opportunity to do this sort of shopping once a year at Stitches...). The first shop I raced to when I got in the door was Blue Moon Fiber Arts. I expected to find that an hour after opening that it was almost denuded, with rabid women fighting over the remains. Boy was I in for a surprise! OK the queue was 10 long but it was not the all-in brawl I had expected to find. I managed to navigate the store quite easily. My aim was the Raven series, of course! I found one skein of Rook-y which I originally intended to send to a friend Back 'Ome but I could not let the yarn go. Rook-y is a rainbow of colours under the black and you all know how much I love rainbow colours. The close-up shot is not the best but it gives some idea of the subtlty. Then there...

G'day all! Ah the siren call of the sock yarn. On Friday I had admired a lovely wussy colourway at Ellen's Halfpint Farm in a merino bamboo blend. I am particularly fond of of what I call lilypond colours - a blend of light spring green, mauve, baby blue and aqua. On Sunday, on my second go-round (I have NO IDEA how people could put up with going three days in a row!) I saw that the yarn was still around. So it had an accident, well my credit card had another accident, and it came home with me. MMmmmm, pretty, shiny! I also saw this plait of wool and umm silk? Bamboo? I don't think it is bamboo fibre cos it appears to have dyed the same colour as the wool base. That sort of rules out tencel as well. The lady at the stall (Carolina Homespun) said if it was warm it was bamboo and cool if it was silk, or was it the other way around? Anyway it is prettier in the hank than it is in the pic. It came home with me too. anon!