Keeping Busy and Sane…Sort Of

Several rows of Apache Trail of Tears in Scheepjes Catona.

The governor of North Carolina has issued a statewide “shelter in place” order, effective this coming Monday. Not that we weren’t pretty much doing that anyway, but now it’s official, and it’s a class 2 misdemeanor if you don’t follow it. Not a problem; I have every intention of following it. But sanity, what little of that I can claim, is now seriously lacking, what with the girls home until at least May 15th, and having to homeschool Bryony.

I have learned that I am not cut out to be a teacher. I’ve always respected them, but my respect has increased since dealing with Bryony’s schoolwork. She knows exactly what buttons to push to piss me off, and does so every chance she gets. I know she doesn’t behave like this at school, at least not with adults, but at home, when it comes to schoolwork, it is the stuff of nightmares. Teachers have twenty or more children to deal with per class. I can barely tolerate my one. If I had to go into a classroom to teach, I’d be out of work in less than a week. I don’t know how they do it. My hat is off to them!

As you can see, retaining my temper and staying out of prison is key at this point. To that end, I’ve got a number of works in progress going. As mentioned previously, there’s the attempt at soutache, a weaving project, and a spinning project. I’ve added another one, as if I didn’t give myself enough already. But there’s a blanket pattern I really, really love, and I’ve wanted to try it for a couple of years. And it so happens that I also have this box of Scheepjes Catona cotton. There are 109 little skeins of yarn, the entire colorway, and they’re perfect for this blanket, which has what I consider an odd name: Apache Trail of Tears. It’s odd, because historically speaking, the Cherokee move west to Oklahoma is called the Trail of Tears. I’ve never heard anything Apache referred to by that name, except for this blanket pattern.

Educational note for those interested: Cherokee and Apache are the European names for the nations. They don’t call themselves by those names. The Cherokee call themselves Tsalagi. The Apache call themselves Inde.

Anyway, I’ve started the blanket after watching several tutorials on it. I had to do that, because for some reason, anything that involves front post crochet is difficult for me, which means waffle stitch and this blanket, among others. I don’t exactly hate front post crochet, but it’s not my favorite thing to do either, simply because it never seems to look right when I do it. I’ve seen other crocheters do it, and it looks perfect. The front post stitches are absolutely ramrod straight, where mine are invariably curved or diagonal or some other nonsense. And I have a lot of trouble keeping track of which stitches to skip because I’ve crocheted around a post. The good thing about this particular pattern is that once you’ve got the first row of “tears” (ie front post crochet) done, every row thereafter, the post goes next to the one from the previous row, so I don’t need the stitch markers, or to keep track of too much. The repeat is an odd number of stitches, as in odds/evens, not strangeness. I chose to do mine as a repeat of 7, so it’s six single crochet, then a triple crochet tear, and it continues that way across the row. Since I know where the next tear is going to be, I count backward six stitches from that point to my most recent tear, instead of moving it aside to see what stitch to skip. It seems to work better for me that way.

I’m truly loving the Scheepjes Catona. I really wish the larger skeins were available locally! The skeins in the Color Pack boxes are tiny, 10 grams each, which works out to 25 meters of yarn per skein. I’m horrible with math, so I couldn’t even begin to tell you what that is in our American math system, and I’m not even going to try. Suffice it to say, it’s not as though you can use a single skein to make something like a scarf. My blanket is 322 stitches across, so I’m doing one row in each color. I do still have yarn left in the skein at the end of the row, but I don’t know that there’s enough to make it across a second row. I guess I’ll find out after I’ve done 109 rows, then I’ll pick up some of the leftover yarn and try to get across a second row!

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Quarantine Soutache

My bead, and the book cover.

After several days of hunting, I finally found the beads I had bought to use with my beginner’s soutache kit. I think I mentioned buying the kit a couple of years ago, along with several books on the subject, and I never got around to actually trying it. So I figured now, when everyone is practicing social distancing and essentially on lockdown, would be the time to give it a try. Today was the big day.

I chose one of the books, and read it up to the first beginner project, learning the basic techniques of what I was about to do. Then I read through the project, got out my beads and supplies, and got down to work. Let me tell you, the learning curve on this is high for me!! Maybe it’s easy for someone else, but this is going to take some practice on my part. First, you glue your chosen beads to the foundation backing, which the book suggests using Lacy’s Stiff Stuff for. Then, once the glue dries, you cut the backing around the bead. The author says you don’t have to leave an edge visible around the bead, but I’ll tell you now, I should have left a slight edge to work with. The sides of my beads are curved outwards, so without that edge, stitching the soutache braid around the bead became a lot more difficult. You can see in the picture, there is a big difference between my bead on the left, and the ones on the book cover. I couldn’t get the braid to stay around the edges of the bead. I have already ripped it all out in preparation of starting over again! But I like what soutache looks like when you get it right, so I’m not giving up yet!

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The Saga Continues, or: Quarantine Blues

Silk roving hanging off Anansi.

I did get that warp on the loom, finally, and made five placemats with it. They aren’t as perfect as I’d like, particularly as I forgot to count the picks, so was going by measuring only, but they’re not horrible. I also didn’t leave enough room between mats, which is another thing I’ll remember to do next time I have a large warp. So, I’m not going to put the photos up.

I’m now giving thought to what I want to do next. I want to get two warps going, one on my Flip, and one on the Mighty Wolf, and I also want to try out overshot weaving. So I’m doing some thinking about it. I’ve gotten the warp onto the Flip, but haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with the Mighty Wolf. In the meantime, I dragged out my book on crocheting socks. I’d wanted to try that out for a long time, so I decided to do it while in between weaving projects. I made two pairs, and was actually very happy with both of them. The second pair was yoga socks, so they have neither heel nor toe, and that actually made them a bit difficult to crochet, because one side of the heel begins with a long chain, and getting the chain to be loose enough is the problem. Mine are both a bit tight, though the second one is looser than the first. If I opt to make them again, I’ll need to make them looser still. But they were fun to make.

First pair of crocheted socks

I have silk spinning on Anansi. That’s what I’m doing as I try to figure out what to weave next. When I started this entry, coronavirus was not quite as prevalent as it is right now. Or maybe I should say, it wasn’t known in the US to be the threat we now know it to be. Now, all of the schools in North Carolina are closed for the next two weeks, and the children will be home, which means finding something to do is now a necessity!!!

I guess it’s a good thing I have so much yarn…I have a feeling I’m going to be using quite a bit of it!

Crocheted yoga socks

While the children are thrilled to be out of school, they’re also bored being confined to the house. Hubby has to work, which isn’t making things any easier. Because of my medical history, I’m immunocompromised, so I’m extremely reluctant to have company or be company nowadays. Social distancing is the new watchword. So Facebook sees a lot of me when I feel the need to be social now!

Besides spinning, I’ve been entertaining the kids by making slime, and of course there are the normal chores that need to be done every day. I was surprised at how much fun I had making slime. I’d never done it before, and the word “slime” does not exactly imply fun to me, but it was. We actually made two batches of normal slime, and one of fluffy. Two batches, we used a few drops of essential oils to scent them. My fluffy slime smells like cloves, which has good memories for me, but the kids don’t like the scent. C’est la vie!

When I began this post, I hadn’t finished spinning the silk, but it is now done and skeined. It isn’t my best effort, although, for not having used my wheel in three years, I think it’s pretty good. But the consistency is, in reality, pretty bad. In some places, it’s the thickness I wanted, but in most others it’s either too thick, or too thin, and when plying it, it broke a couple of times. All in all, while it could be worse, it could also be much better. In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have started with silk, although it’s one of my favorite fibers to spin. I have a tote absolutely full of different types of silk waiting to be spun. I also have a lot of much less expensive merino that I probably should have spun first. From a financial standpoint, it’s much more forgiving!

Spun, plied, and skeined silk

After skeining the silk on my niddy-noddy this evening, I went on a hunt through my totes to see what I could use for practice, and came across a bag that I’d forgotten about: a bunch of roving purchased from a well-known, foreign, online website. This bag was purchased roughly three years ago, and is full of tiny bags of roving. It is also the crappiest roving I’ve ever had the dubious pleasure of touching. Aneira is not a spinner, but she touched this stuff and one of the merino rovings I purchased from an LYS here, and she could feel the difference in quality. This stuff feels horrible in the hand. As in, you wouldn’t want anything you made from it close to your skin. But it is good for one thing: practice!!!

Sif investigating the really cheap roving!

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