Playing Catch Up

I hate it when I make things harder for myself than I have to.  I've been trying to figure out how to make art yarn.  After spending the past ten years making all my yarns uniform, I want to shake it up.  I've read a couple of articles and I've tried several techniques, but it wasn't until a couple days ago that I realized that I had this book in my library.  I'm sure it's been there for ten years and it's never been opened.  It's fantastic!!  Reading it could had saved me so many hard lessons.  And she's a weaver so talks about using art yarn as weft.

Varney suggested knitting your yarns into samples.  She was thinking like keeping a notebook, but these hats are my samples.  I've been pretty random in my fiber blending and have used varied spinning techniques.  I still have so much to learn.  The huge hat in the center bottom was from my Lexi Boeger class at conference on super coils.  I think it's safe to say that is a technique I probably won't repeat.  It's heavy.

Since I really want to use my yarn in weavine, I was anxious to get a warp on and weave some practice scarves.  I'm having a hard time understanding how to enterlace different grists of yarns in weaving. It's bidirectional so not quite as simple as knitting.  A couple of years ago a woman contacted me and said she was no longer weaving, did I want some of her stash.  Well, duh.  I met her at an agreed place and she gave me tons of undyed cones of yarn.  This warp is from that stash.  I don't know what it is.  It's about the same grist as my 8/2 dishtowel cotton and it's shiny.  The warp is a variegated thick-and-thin cotton someone gave me to get it out of her house.  Hmmm.  I'm using a M and W pattern and I don't know how it's going to wet finish, but I suspect it's going to feel like a dishtowel around my neck.

So the second scarf on this warp.  I don't know what it is either.  I bought it from a friend who was selling at the conference tailgate market.  She said needed to destash.  Does this sound familiar?  I bought four cones from her at $5 a cone.  This is one of them and I think it's rayon.  I have a feeling that after wet finishing, it's going to feel like a strip of upholstery around my neck.  I hope I'm wrong because it's pretty.

There was so much going on the week after we got back from vacation.  We had to drive into town to return the rental car and buy some groceries.  The next day we had to take my car into town for service, which is why we took a rental car in the first place.  I forget how fracturing those trips are - always have to allow two hours road time.   I had an email on Monday from my old running partner, asking whether or not I was going to be able to make the brunch on Friday?  I didn't realize we had one, but yeah.  My head is still reeling.  Four of us who were friends from 30 years ago sat and talked forever.  We had belonged to a tight group of several dozen and then life spontaneously changed and we all went our own ways, many of us out of state.  I was exhausted after I left but I felt really good.  I was thankful that I had scheduled lunch with my favorite woman on the planet - my daughter!

I needed some steadying fiber karma.  I've dabbled in getting a towel warp on Maudie Mae and realized that I was hung up on the final step.  I like to lash onto the front beam on a wider warp, but  I hate pulling through the lash across all the bouts. I realized that if I use a bobbin from my Kumihimo kit, I can wind all the lashing cord onto it and reel it out as I move across.  I was done in a couple of minutes.  Zounds Batgirl!  I'm awesome!!

And just like that, it started again.  This was about 1:30 yesterday and the fire appears to have started on Hwy 395, a north/south corridor between Reno and Susanville.  We are exactly halfway between both.  There were a couple of fire planes on it, but they seemed to think they were going to knock it down quickly with the absence of wind.

And they were wrong.  By late afternoon, we had a steady steam of fire planes flying over the house since we've also in the flight path to the Stead airport, home of the Reno Air Races.  That's another story.

With an unusual absence of wind, the fire crept down into the valley.  That's not two demon eyes you see.  It was an uneasy sleep last night.

I snapped this shot of a group of fire trucks at the base of the seven sisters.  That's why they call that formation.  I was overwhelmed by the support and took no more pictures because I'd be in the way.  There were semis on standby, having brought in the dozers that worked through the night to establish the fire line that kept the flames from our valley.

There were over a dozen more support vehicles, including sleeping units at the top of Red Rock Road.  I crept through the maze to get onto the highway and choked up as a firefighter waved me by.  I'm so grateful that they go out in this miserable heat to keep us safe. 

My DIL Missy is in town with my grandsons to help her mother post surgery.  We visited for a while, checked out some knitting, and played a rousing game of Apples to Apples - more goodness.  I left to see my doc and polished off the day by stocking up at Costco.  It was 102 when I left there and I got soon heard one of the disaster alert messages on the radio for flashflood warnings.  Huh?  I hadn't driven another five miles when the sky opened up.  It was like driving through a car wash.   By the time I reached our highway, my temperature gauge registered 66 degrees.  Welcome to the high desert.  I can image the fire crews were doing a happy dance.  The smell of smoke still lingers tonight.  Heroes?  You know my answer.