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December 2019 Playlist
Spotify just sent out 2019 playlists – all the songs you listened to most in 2019 in one place. I realized while listening to it and my regular playlists that I overplayed some and am currently really gravitating toward others that I recently added, so I made a new shorter playlist cleverly name December 2019…
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My Latest Sweater
This is the story of a sweater, but it starts with the story of another sweater … and then two more: All The Sweaters! Almost three years ago now, I stumbled on a picture of a beautiful sweater on Instagram – the Turka Bluesky from Natela Astakhova. I love the colors she chose and the…
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Hot Pepper Harvest and Sauce-making
One summer I grew tri-color peppers (capsicum annuum) from seed in a pot on our deck. As the peppers ripen, they turn from white to purple to yellow-orange to red and the plant is really pretty and did quite well. When it came time to harvest, I tossed a few shriveled peppers into our Meyer…
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Coopworth Batwing
I knit a batwing in an attempt to knit a shawl using handspun Coopworth yarn. See? This is another project that I made from spinning the yarn all the way to FO, only I don’t have pictures of the fiber or the spinning process. I’m not even sure when I spun the yarn; I know…
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Handspun Lifted
I finished another knit hat with handspun this weekend. This time I used a skein of yarn that started as a bump of super wash merino from Pigeon Roof Studios, who is no longer dyeing. I’m so sad I didn’t discover her sooner; I love how her bumps have turned out when I spun them.…
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Peasant Cap: From Spinning Fiber to Finished Object
I spun the yarn for my latest hat during Tour de Fleece 2018 and Spinzilla 2017 (the only Spinzilla I’ve done). Both started out life as 2 ply fractal spun yarns, but I ended up cable plying them both, which essentially means I made the 2 ply yarns into center pull balls and plied the…
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My First Sweater Made With Hand Spun Yarn
You would think I carefully planned my first hand spun (and first steeked) sweater but, dear reader, I did not. I just got lucky. I bought a brown merino x fleece at a local farm when my knitting group visited it in spring 2010. I had just started spinning the previous summer and this fleece…
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On Writing
In January, I got a message from an old co-worker asking me if I might be interested in talking to him about a position at his current company. I last worked with him in 2003 (or possibly 2002 – it was a while ago) while I was a senior technical writer for the information technology…
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Spinning: My Wheels
I started researching spinning wheels in the summer of 2009 and ended up buying a 1970s-era Ashford Traditional that had 2 bobbins and a really bad stain job. Researching wheels and all the options available was really overwhelming; I had no idea what to look for or the advantage or use of one thing over…
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Spinning: How I Started
In the fall of 2009, I joined a fairly new knitting group that met at a local Panera. As is often the case, many of them did more than knit and some crocheted. One woman was coming off a jag of cross stitching. A few had learned to spin and would bring their drop spindles…
Little Golden Notebook 