The Spinning Goth

Not much.  You?

I’ve gone back to spinning in an effort to both make myself useful (in between bouts of trying to drum up students) and keep my depression at bay.  Most of what I’ve been working on for the past year (oh fuck.  Really a year?) has been this:

The Fleece That Will Not Die

Yep, really.  It’s woolen spun with a somewhat modified long draw from carded rolags.  Probably 25-30 WPI singles, although that’s probably the optimist in me talking.  (Meaning it’s a hell of a lot bigger than that.)

I’m not sure what I’ll do with this once it’s finished.  At one time I’d thought about putting them in my long-neglected Etsy shop, but I doubt that anybody would buy that any more than they did the black cross I had in there at first.  But we’ll see.  I think if I dyed that a solid color, letting the fleece take care of the variegating, that might help.  But maybe not.

In other news…I’m trying really hard to avoid thinking about Mother’s Day this year.  The Girl and I had talked about going to the Muffins with Mum breakfast they had at the school today.  When we were getting ready to go, she said she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want to after all.  Yes, I had fed her breakfast 2 hours before – we get up early, and she’s usually starving when she wakes up – but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.

On the bright side, I had plenty to talk about with my therapist today.

I made my mum a card; it’s up on Twitpic, but I’ll try to import it in here.  Let’s see if it works…

This is pretty much the go-to present for somebody who threatens you with bodily harm if you buy them one more thing for the house. Well okay, not really. But she really doesn’t want any more stuff, and has no problem telling people so. Yes, every mother says that, but my mother actually means it. The design is from the Sublime Stitching Dutch and Russian transfers. Works really well when stitched up on cardstock, but some of it had to be drawn in. Blame my paranoia about having all that stitching fall off due to over-perforation.

I’ve decided that, at least for now, a single blog isn’t going to do whatever for me.  So…back I go.

Well, that’s it. I can’t keep up with two (actually, more than two now) blogs at the same time. So, one of them has to go.

I’ll leave this up indefinitely, at least for the patterns. After next week, all comments will be closed; mostly to cut down on Teh Spam, but so I don’t have to keep checking back so often. If you’ve got any comments on patterns, knitting, spinning or life in general, please come over to Evil Mommy for a visit. Update your links if you’d like – I’m adding another category on my blogroll as well.

As I’ve written about before, August is our Official Birthday Month here at Chez Goth. There are, um, 13 or so at last count. So far, we’ve gotten through three of them. Four if you count today. M, my daughter’s other mom, turns 25 today. She had mentioned last December that she and her friends were dreading turning 25. I had to work really, really hard not to laugh out loud. “Yeah, I remember 25. I think…”

But anyway, we’re here to talk about fiber things. Right? Yes. Of course we are. So, then, here’s M’s Winter Solstice/Yule/Xmas present – all 2″ of it:

It’s the top 2″ of a pair of arrgyles (chart is in the left hand sidebar). M loves skulls, so I figured she’s like these. I must be insane, but I think I can have them finished and blocked before Winter Solstice. Did I mention I’m doing these in the round?

I also printed out a couple of patterns from the Lughnasadh edition of The Anticraft; Tepes and the Bat Shawl. And it may work out that I can take my mom’s sweater with me this weekend to present it in person – before her birthday. In that case, I’ll get her to model it for the blog.