At Last! Time 2 B

It's been a long time coming, and I've promised so many, so often that I can't believe it's finally time:  Today you can get your very own Adult Bee pattern, to make in any of six sizes, at the length of your choice. 

CLICK HERE to get it.

Not to make too obscure a reference, but if you happened to see the Teachers' Talent Show at the Madrona Winter Retreat this year (What happens at Madrona Stays at Madrona), where there was an official Media Blackout, you saw me wear the original Queen Bee.  Among Other Things.  'Nuff said.  Lots of people asked me about the pattern after that, which is the only reason I bring it up now.

The original version of the bee sweater was a baby cardigan; one of three that inspired me to publish my first book.  I was surprised and delighted when one after another, knitters asked me to re-tool the motif as an adult sweater.  In fact, from the very first, everywhere I went that people had seen that baby bee sweater, knitters assertively *cough-aggressively-cough* let me know what they wanted.  And they were not shy.  Knitters crossed rooms, crossed book-signing lines, crossed lanes of traffic; all to let me know that while the baby version was fine, what they really wanted was a grown-up bee sweater of their very own.

Which I realized, should not have the same naive spirit as the original. An adult bee sweater had to reflect wisdom, and stature, and well, royalty of a sort.  It could only be a QUEEN BEE. 

Much as with the original, the adult bee sweater almost knitted itself.  The yarn was a complete no-brainer:  Blue Moon Fiber Arts, with Force of Nature Tina Newton at the helm, supplied the yarn without batting a lash.  Even though I don't normally like V-necks, this one told me loudly and often that it needed to Bee a Vee.  I never question messages from the universe which are that loud and clear.

I hope you'll enjoy the Queen as much as I have.  Thank you so much for telling me how much she was wanted.  And for patiently waiting while I made it happen for you. 

Long Live the Queen.

Paper Tiger

Some days, no matter how hard you try, your toilet just ends up in the backyard.

Oh sure, like it's never happened to you.  It started out innocently enough.  Deeply in love with our new brown paper bag flooring, the Fam and I decided that the next area to get the treatment had to be the downstairs loo.  Never has a floor been in more desperate need of help than in that room.  The same room that every guest to our home ends up visiting.  So embarrassing.  Phillip to the rescue (note the unwavering trust in his eyes):

He indulgently removed the commode, then tore up the ghastly old vinyl.  Observe the gag-inducing ring where the throne used to be.  Classy.  This is such a small amount of flooring that it fit into our normal trash pickup.  No removal fees!

I then filled a plethora of nail holes and gaps in the subfloor with joint compound ($4).  Smooth, baby!  While that dried, the Smallies and I tore pieces off a big roll of brown kraft construction paper ($11).  We separated the pieces into two piles: "straight edges" and "centers", depending on where they had been torn from the roll.  Then we crumpled each piece up, smoothed it out, and re-crumpled it.  This is the crucial step that gives the interesting depth and texture to the finished floor.

While the Smallies finished crumpling, I lightly sanded the joint compound.  After crumpling, each paper piece got dunked in a mixture of 3:1 water and white glue ($12), then smoothed onto the floor with a brush.  I painted more of the glue mixture onto the floor under each piece as I went along.  I used the pieces with straight edges along the walls, and the center pieces in the middle.  I decided that the more randomly-chosen and placed each piece was, the better the pattern looked.  It took about 20 minutes to cover the whole powder room floor.

Then we let it dry overnight, with a fan blowing it from each end of the room.  This was the hardest part for my weapons-grade impatience.

After that, we put on 5 coats of floor oil-modified polyurethane floor varnish ($47).  It sounds like a lot of work, but each coat only took 5 minutes to put on with a plain old 4" paintbrush.  If I were doing larger areas at a time, I'd probably look into a different tool for the varnish application, but since it's only small bits at a time, the brush is just fine. 

Since the toilet was already out of the way, we decided to go ahead and hang new baseboards while we were at it.  Aren't they sexy?  5" high and gleaming white.  I painted them with spray paint ($4) on sawhorses in the backyard between varnish coats.  Once I had them installed, I only had to fill and paint nail holes.  Another advantage of doing one small area of our floor at a time: The ridiculous cost of $20 per stick of sexy baseboards is easier to bear.  This room took 2, with some leftover.

And that's it!  If you are keeping track, the materials for this project so far add up to $118 (or so my calculator tells me *insert math joke here*).  We have enough paper, glue and varnish left to do about half the remaining ground floor.  So if we weren't upgrading the baseboards (could have re-used the old ones, if I hadn't hated them like a tent full of mosquitoes), I estimate that our whole lower level would be re-floored for under $250.

Do you have any idea how much yarn I can buy now?

P.S.  Please don't think I came up with the notion a papier-mache floor all on my own.  My sister saw one in a shop 6 years ago and told me about it.  In the interim, others have installed and blogged their own brown paper floors.  If you're interested in trying this yourself, a simple internet search will tell you all you need to know.  Or, of course, drop me a line!

Rejoining the Flock

Last weekend was the annual Black Sheep Gathering here in Oregon.  I was lucky enough to attend with my pals Carson & Val. 

I got to watch my first fleece judging, which was tremendously informative, and lots of fun.  The downside to watching all those fleeces be unrolled and discussed is that no matter how much you don't need one, you will fall in love with at least one of them and become determined to make it your own.  And making one your own is not necessarily easy at Black Sheep, because lots of other determined spinners are probably also in love with that fleece, particularly if they saw it win a ribbon, too.

We did all right though:

Imagine how many we would have had if we didn't have such great self-control?  Carson is going to process his Corriedale and his Shetland himself.  We elected to send the Merino and the other Corriedale out for processing before splitting them three ways, since each of us already has raw fleece(s) waiting for our attention at home.  And then we decided that our next adventure together would be a fleece processing party, rather than going to the next event (where we might accidentally acquire yet more fiber). 

And when I got home, I spent some quality time with Wheely:

I've been on a self-imposed spinning diet for the last year, while I wrote a book.  I hated to do it, but I had to in the interest of limiting my distractions.  I had no idea how badly I'd been missing it.  Yesterday I made this:

Huckleberry Knits Falkland roving, in a colorway called "Catching Fire". 

Spinning is so good for me because I have intentionally lowered the bar for myself.  In knitting, everything has to be as close to perfect as physically possible.  It's all about precision and control.  There are a million rules, because every time I knit something, the idea is to be able to tell others to make the exact same thing.  With spinning though, I don't give myself any rules at all.  I let the fiber be whatever it wants, however it wants, and focus on the delight of discovering what the wheel wants to give me.  Denying myself that space of freedom was harder than I realized.  I'm not going to do that again, if I can possibly help it.  I'm so glad to be back in the flock of spinners again.