Textileophile

 hi friends! It's, again, been almost a month since I last posted.  bad blogger, bad blogger! I've been up to things, making stuff, reading, playing video games.  The usual.  The Tour de Fleece started yesterday! V. hype! I suppose I'll start where I left off last time?  I was making a hexie bag for my friend, Amara.  Welp, I finished it and sent it off and she loves it! I'm.. I won't say that I'm done making these things, cause they're fantastic, but I was sort of making it to get through it, rather than enjoying the process particularly. The temporary aida cloth that I bought for the cross stitching was a pain in the ass to remove from the fabric.  It was painful and difficult.  If I do this again, which you know me, I probably will, I'm going to look up a better removable cloth. There was some knitting, and in fact I went to the local yarn store in Sacramento with Zac last weekend.  The shop is called Rumpelstiltskin's and it was fantastic...

 It's been a few weeks. My LASIK surgery was a success! I can see! :O  Now what I got is actually called mono vision, which is a neat trick where they make one eye especially good at far and the other especially good at near.  And amazingly, both are fairly good at both now.  Incredible.  I haven't been able to read without the aid of glasses in.. decades.  If ever.  far sighted, yo.  I got some cute sunglasses for wearing out of doors, and it's been good. I've been dealing with a little bit of dry eyes though, which does affect my far sightedness out of doors, but I've been using eye drops.  It's steadily improving.  It was absolutely worth it.  If you're on the fence, don't be, do the thing! Now the things you're here for.  Crafting! I don't even really remember where I left off last time.  I know there was a chocobo happening and some socks.  Spinning and cross stitch.  I kind of did a little bit of all of tho...

 It's been a few weeks and I've been doing a lot of good stuff!  There's reading, cross stitching, some knitting and spinning. So, without further ado, I suppose I'll start where I left off last time. Pokemoning Progress! I finished page 2!  Woohoo! At this rate I'll be done.. uh, in awhile.  It's OK though.  No one is expecting me to finish this any time soon.  I keep thinking that I wished I worked on it more, but then again, I have a lot of fun things I've been doing and I like the idea of spreading my fixations around. I finished the first sock: The great fitting experiment is turning out to be a great success! I am well into the second sock, but Zac's on nights, so my knitting time is being usurped by youtube crafting. A few weeks ago I won a prize from one of my thread families.  It was a stuffed moogle! I immediately put her on my bookshelf next to the tonberry and Vivi: And then I ordered yarn for making a chocobo.  Had to be done.  H...

You all remember the last pair of socks I knit?  yes, yes?  It was the reknit of the pink and white from January.  I reknit them on double zero needles (that's 1.75 mm for the international folk). I finished them:   And they are lovely and soft and have a much better gauge than they did from the first knitting. But alas, they didn't fit that well.  WOMP WOMP.  I had a sinking feeling they wouldn't.  but! Do not fret!  I've gifted them to Hazel who wears size 7 shoe.  They fit her great! Win/win! I did start some new socks, for myself this time.  I decided to stick with the 00 needles, because the gauge really was good on the pink and white. They're just a touch tighter than the 0s were when I originally started knitting socks on 0s quite a few years ago. Anyway, all that to say, the great sock fitting experiment has continued.  This time the adjustments I made were two-fold.  I upped the stitch count from 64 to 68 stitches, and...

 It's only been about a week since I last posted, but boy howdy, do I have news! Well, I'll start from the beginning.  Two or three weeks ago, Zac ordered ceiling fans for the living room, office and bedrooms.  We spent the next week installing them.  It wasn't too difficult, the wiring in the house is brand new, and it was just a matter of getting them up there.  I helped, naturally, and it was a very productive week. Hazel's room was the penultimate one.  I sat on her carpet putting rubber grommets in the fan blades for attaching the metal bits while Zac was doing the wiring and installing the fan base.  I was admiring the pokemon, you know the first generation I stitched in 2021? Such an enormous amount of stitching, over 115 thousand little exes.  And so much fun to watch all the little monsters take shape. And then... I felt that familiar pull.  The one that makes me do nutty things like stitching entire pokemon generations.  When I...

 Well, shoot.  Another few weeks have gone by and uh, I'm afraid to say the reading train is still a chuggin'. There was some crafting though. I brought out my e-spinner, Ariel, for some continuation of this spin:       This is Merino bamboo, slippery as all get out, but not unenjoyable. I've been spinning on this while watching short things on youtube (things like catching up on a few knitting podcasts, watching Dansg08 play FFX using only 'attack')  Not actually very much progress, really, but if you work on something for 30-60 minutes every day-ish, you're likely to see progress. Last I talked, I was working on the redo socks from earlier this year.  I officially re-finished the first one, but I officially did not take a picture.  oop. The kids were on Spring break last week!  They mostly slept.  I had to pry them out of bed in the late afternoons to eat something before they crawled back to their dark hiding holes, only their faces a...

I, uh, feel weird posting again cause it's been a few weeks and I don't have very much at all craft-wise to show for it. I know I said I'd spin.  And I did.  A little bit. Well, now that looks like a lot a bit, but I have 3 more bobbins to fill and since this happened I have done fuck all on my wheel.  Shameful. And in fact, my drive band snapped when I was nearly done with this braid (this is 4 ounces of polwarth for the uninitiated/ forgetful among us).  I was able to reaffix the ends together with a bit of fire and gumption, but looking at it, well, it's yellowing.  And it's nearly 8 years old.  So, I did the thing and ordered a new one.  This isn't so strange. Wheels, like some other tools, have parts that are good for the life of it as long as you take care of them-- the wheel itself and all the wood and metal bits.  And then there are the parts that wear out like the drive band and the footman ties and the leather bits. All part of wheel upk...