They're Back!!!

Yes, the hummingbirds are back, BIG TIME!

A week ago, as I walked out to my car, one humbuzzed me - it orbited my head a few times, then hovered in front of me for a bit. I love hummingbirds - did you know they are considered a symbol of joy! That seems quite appropriate to me.

Well, a few days ago, as Eldy was getting ready to leave for work, he called me to come to the front door, then walked out. Near the end of our sidewalk, in a canopy of vines (cape honeysuckle), there was a tiny hummingbird nest, with Momma sitting there, so very still!

Sorry the focus isn't very good - I tried to get as close as I could, and used the macro focus setting. Wish I had a newer or better camera, but I'll keep experimenting till I can get some good pictures. I'm hoping to set up a mirror so we can get a shot of the eggs next time Mama is out feeding. (Last year, we got a whole sequence of pictures of baby hummingbirds, from when they were tiny, til when they flew, but I never got a shot of the 2 little eggs.)

On a different note, but still speaking of Joy - you may know my beloved standard poodle is named Joy. Well, she's 14 now, and starting to show her age. Her back left leg gives her trouble and she stumbles from time to time. Last Monday, I was playing piano and practicing my singing, and heard her nails clicking on the pergo flooring in the family room, fast and loud. I figured she had gotten stuck or tangled in something and ran in there to help her. What I found was terrifying - she was having a seizure. It lasted a couple of minutes, and I comforted her and got her cleaned up. She walked around restlessly for about 20 minutes - couldn't get her to sit or lie down - she would come over and lean against me for a few seconds for petting, then would wander away. By the time that was over, she was her normal, cheerful happy self, as if nothing had happened. Interestingly, she wasn't stumbling as much, either.

Since then, I've discovered it's not a rare thing for an aging dog to have a seizure. When it happened, I was so frightened and worried that she was dying. I don't know how you make peace with this difficult phase of a pet relationship, so I just keep an eye on her, and cherish every day.

Cotton Pickin Spinning

Back in the 90's, Joan Ruane came to San Diego to teach cotton and flax spinning. She's a great teacher and a wonderful woman. (My youngest son was in 2nd grade at the time, and adored Joan. He thought she was actually another grandmother that we had just forgotten to tell him about.) Hopefully, Joan will send me a copy of the picture I took with her camera of her and Sam,who is now almost 19 years old and 6'6". :-)


The guild brought Joan back to San Diego in February for a program on cotton - an afternoon workshop on spinning cotton with a tahkli spindle, and then a one day workshop on preparing cotton and spinning it on a wheel. I didn't sign up for the full day workshop, since I had taken that when she was here before, but I really enjoy her and did take the tahkli workshop as a refresher. I had a marvelous time, and even bought one of her spindles. I already had a tahkli at home, but hers are so incredibly well balanced that I couldn't resist adding one to my collection.
The picture above shows some of the other participants in the class, and that's Joan standing (black top and white scarf) helping someone.

This picture shows what I've spun so far (natural green organic cotton), and next to the spindle is my little support gizmo. For those of us with unlevel laps, these are handy. You sit with it between your legs, which gives you a support bowl for the spindle that won't fall off your lap.


The timing was auspicious, too. I ended up coming down with another deep chest cold, darned it all. Not good, but... I did get some nice spinning time in.

In the meantime, I had a grocery sack of cotton that was homegrown by my friend Jan Frazee. Another activity while I watched the Olympics and coughed was picking seeds out of the cotton. In my hand is the cotton from a boll, you can see a seed exposed that I'm about to pick out. To the left is a nice pile of fluff and above is a little pile of seeds. This is definitely the slow way to do the task, but does work well as a tv watching activity.


In other news, I'm finally ready to start weaving again. The loom has been warped for a while, but I needed a few things in place and finally got myself to start moving on it. I found the brackets I used to hang weights off the back for live weight tension and got it all set up. Found another shuttle to use for a lighter weft for hems, and most importantly of all, reviewed my notes so I could refresh my mind on what I was planning to do, oh so long ago. Better late than never, eh?!

Waterworld

We've had drought conditions for so long, and water restrictions that got tighter and tighter, so this abundance of water has been astonishing!

Here's what our backyard looked like yesterday.

This is looking through the French doors next to my desk. Thankfully - we didn't have any trees fall. (Thought the green belt that runs by our house on the other side of the wall is littered with branches, as is the eucalyptus aroma.) No major leaks, either, although the rug under my desk was damp near the door, so some moisture blew in. We'll have to fix that. Much of the water has finally drained away, though we do still have a standing pool. It's probably time to have roots cleared out of the drain pipes, I suppose.

Sandra visiting SDCWG

Here's a photo of Sandra before her presentation to San Diego Creative Weavers Guild.

Lynn is on her left and Taryl is on her right. The table is covered with Sandra's scarves - from her wood series and water series and fire series. They are just exquisite and it was amazing how the patterns seemed to change depending on light and viewing angle and proximity.

Sandra's topic was The Magic of Interleaved Threadings and it was truly fascinating! You can check out her blog at http://sandrarude.blogspot.com/ or her web site at http://www.3springshandworks.com/Textiles.htm to see more of her beautiful work.

Challenging Assumptions and Limitations

I had hoped to post next about the delight of having Sandra Rude visit San Diego and give our guild a marvelous program called The Magic of Interleaved Threadings. It was absolutely fascinating, and augmented with a table full of gorgeous scarves. She topped it off with handouts including colored images of drafts! I was especially taken with her description of the inspiration for some of her work - a teacher had told her to find an element of nature that inspired her, and find a way to weave it. Now, this tickled me in particular because the very first weaving class I took, when it was time to plan our first project, I was asked by the teacher what I wanted to weave. "I want to weave water!" I replied. She gave me a funny look and suggested I think about it a while longer and let her know when I had picked my yarns and draft. :-)

The bad news is that apparently the batteries for my camera have reached the limits of their age, and they don't recharge properly anymore. So.... I wasn't able to get any pictures. Sandra let me take a picture with her camera, which she is going to email to me. With her permission, I'll post that here when I get it.

In the meantime, I want to talk about all this new year's stuff. I'm not making resolutions this year - not even the "in action" kind that I made last year (which apparently didn't take.) It's no secret that I've been stalled again, and for quite a while. Of course, not weaving doesn't mean I'm not doing a lot of other things, but it still bothers me greatly that I'm not getting any weaving done.

So... I've been thinking about my situation, and something occurred to me. I have some built-in limitations that I have not challenged in the past. Perhaps I could win some newly inspired activity just by challenging those unquestioned assumptions about my own limitations. Here are the two main ones that come to mind.

• I am a person who does not enjoy wet-messy processes.

Okay, in the past, this has been true. I'm not much for painting, or for dyeing, or for cooking, for that matter. These are what I categorize as "wet-messy processes", and so I've tended to avoid them - justifying it by saying to myself that it is just the way I am. But why is that? And why can't that change? I don't know if I'll do anything about this, but I've put myself on notice that there may be some wet-messy adventures ahead of me!

• I need large blocks of time to do anything creative - no 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there for me!

I have friends who will do all kinds of things in tiny bits of available time. I even have one friend who keeps her knitting handy and knits at red lights and in traffic jams! Me - I've always thought in the past that it was too hard to switch gears to do bits of things - that I need at least an hour of available time before I'll jump into something. But is that really true? And doesn't it reflect more a lack of preparation rather than a proclivity? What if I were to have some projects (a variety of them, because ironically, I *am* a magpie) already setup, with everything already at hand to begin work, maybe even with a post-it note telling me the exact next step to take. That would avoid the mental context switch that seems so cumbersome that I avoid having to make it.

I'm not promising anything, but I wonder what could happen if I became a person who can change focus at will and is oblivious to drippy messes? It's actually sounding rather fun and intriguing to discover the answer to that question!

And on a good note - at the Unity Center I attend, we start every year with a White Stone meditation. In ancient times, prisoners were given a white stone with their "new name", signifying that they had paid their dues and were now free to begin a new life. During the meditation, we're guided to find our own personal white stone word for the coming year - a quality, an aspect - something we want to manifest more in our lives. Each year, I go to that service with an idea already in mind for what I think my white stone word will be. This year, I thought it was going to be "acceptance" (a positive way to say non-judgment.) But, nope, something else came through in the meditation, and my white stone word for 2010 is HeartSong. And I love it. So although I'm making no specific resolutions - my goal for this year is to find and follow what makes my heart sing. I like that.

Brioche Boo Boo

I've been doing some simple knitting lately - currently working on a brioche rib narrow scarf in denim blue Merino. I'm enjoying this stitch immensely, until I make a mistake.

For the first experiment with this stitch, I cast on and started knitting. Made a mistake, tried to rip it out and redo, but couldn't seem to fix it so you couldn't tell where the mistake row had been. (Should have checked with this page, which says to rip out to the row *above* the mistake, then rip out that last row one stitch at a time. I decided I had made the scarf too wide, so I just ripped out the whole thing, cast on with fewer stitches, and started again.

Last night, I noticed I had made a mistake in one of the edge stitches about 10 rows back. Eyes and brain are not at their best at night, so I just set it aside.

This afternoon, the groceries are put away and the Christmas preparations mostly done, so I decided to tackle the brioche repair.

Since this was an edge stitch, I ripped out each edge stitch back to the mistake, then a few more so I could figure out the path to take to do the repair with a crochet hook. It worked!

In this first picture, my finger is pointing to the place where the repair began. On this side, you can't really see anything, I think, I hope. On the other side, there's a slight difference, but not really very noticable, and definitely better than the hole that was there before. :-)

I'm feeling very pleased with myself, and more likely to use this stitch more often now that I know that mistakes can indeed be repaired.

Great Balls of Fiber

My friend Mary is the coordinator for our guild's evening group. (Our guild meets the second Saturday of each month, and we also have an evening meeting on the second Monday night of each month.) She was looking for ideas for programs, and I remembered seeing a description of a neat project on WeaveTech - I think posted by Cathie from New Zealand? That post didn't include detailed instructions, so here's what I wrote up for Mary to send out to participants.

Great Balls of Fiber Challenge

The challenge is to a) clear out fine yarns you no longer want and b) transform those yarns into balls of really cool, unique yarns that can be used as either warp or weft, or for knitting or crochet.

Things to bring:

• a ballwinder
• a pair of scissors
• cones or spools or balls of fine yarns - any fiber, any color, any amount
• a binder clip (to use as a simple thread guide)
• a paper sack (to keep the things you're winding from rolling all around the room, and to take home what you create)
  

What we'll do:
SETUP: When we arrive, we'll put all of the cones or balls on a central table, and each person will set up their winding station with their sack, binder clip, ballwinder, and scissors. Attach the ballwinder to the table, put a binder clip on the edge of the table, flip one leg out to use as a guide), and set the sack on the floor below the binder clip.

SELECTION: When everyone is ready to begin, you will go to the yarn table and pick a minimum of 4 yarns to combine into your own unique Great Ball of Fiber.

WINDING: Place your source yarns in the paper sack. Grab the ends of each thread, holding them together, run the new yarn up through the binder clip and attach it to the ballwinder. Wind a ball until the ball is either large enough, or one of your source yarns runs out.

REPEAT: Keep choosing new yarns and winding new balls until time is up.













And here's what they made! Sure wish I could have joined them. (I had symphony chorus rehearsal that night.) Thank you Chris for the photos! I can't wait to see what they make with their new yarns.

(P.S. The NZ guild that did this originally didn't let the yarn creators keep their yarns - they had a big auction, and if you wanted to keep what you had made, you had to have the winning bid! Great idea for a fundraiser.)