Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Make One Yarn Studio

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Make One Yarn Studio

This is an amazing LYS, I just have to say! Amy has done a really wonderful job with the place. It's very bright and inviting, has a good variety of fibres and price points, and nice, friendly staff. Granted, I was there on a weekday morning, so it was less busy than it might have been, but they made me a pot of tea! And, they had comfy couches for me to sit and knit while and drank my tea, before continuing with the shopping.

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And, for full disclosure, I bought two skeins of Dream in Color Classy and a few Zephyr Style patterns: Wicked, Rusted Root and Juliet.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Custom Woolen Mills

So, I'm back in Canada for a little vacation right now. I was lucky enough in my travels to visit a few fibrey locations, which I thought I might profile (because the rest of my vacation will include a lot of sleep, which just isn't that exciting...)

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On 19 June, I stopped by the Custom Woolen Mills. Even though it is a production mill and everyone was hard at work, people took a few minutes to walk me through the process!

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First, they wash all of the materials in this huge thing! I was amazed that it doesn't felt, as they use really hot water to get rid of the lanolin, but it comes out the other side just fine.

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Then, items that are dyed go through the dye bath.

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After they are dry, they need to be prepared. This is the carding machine on the way in. This machine is preparing fibre to be used for sleeping bag/duvets. You can see the machines for yarn production in the top part of the picture. When carding for yarn, the fibre goes through a double carding process, with the second one perpendicular to the first, to ensure the fibres are thoroughly blended.

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And this is the out end of the carder. This comes out as a sheet, whereas the yarn system cuts the sheet into a pencil roving as its finished product.

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This is the Spinning Jenny, which takes the pencil roving and spins it into yarn. After this, there are a few more steps to end up with skeins for sale.

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This is the sock knitting machine! It knits a continuous string of socks with two heels per sock. Then, a person has to cut them apart and finish the second heel as the toe. It looks much less time consuming than my knitted socks!

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And the store, of course! I did buy a pound of woolen-spun, worsted weight yarn (as opposed to their worsted spun option... I learn new things from every knitting book... this is from Nancy J Thomas' Tweed book) in a natural grey. Anyway, it's cloudy today, so I will add photos when the sun comes out again. (ETA the photo is now here)

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All in all, a very nice afternoon!

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Book Meme

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote (I own)
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre

The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife (I love this book)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin (I own)
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum (I own)
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath (I own)
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel (I own)
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (eta: I may have read this?)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Sunday, June 01, 2008

I might be crazy

So, I've run into a problem, which has me thinking I'm going out of my mind. When I last worked on this sweater

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I was sure I had lots of yarn. Now, I've only got half a skein left, and I'm not sure whether it was me, or the only other person that moves things around my house: my cleaner.

I'm aware that this is going to sound bad. Most people can't even afford a cleaner, so I'm very lucky to be able to have someone. But half of the time, it makes me mental, to the point where I can no longer remember what I've done because someone is regularly moving things when I'm not here.

Anyway, having tossed the stash, I've determined that I don't have any more of this yarn, whatever I may have thought before. Which leaves me with a dilemma: I have more than half of a sweater, and no chance of finishing it unless I find more of this yarn... which I got in France last summer. Anyone have a contact in France who can help me obtain a fifth skein?