Football, anyone?

I hope you enjoy the holiday football frenzy!!!
GO GATORS!!!

Happy Holidays!!

Yes, I've been very bad. I have still to take pictures of my new wheel. Sorry. Been too busy spinning up a storm, not to mention getting ready for the holidays AND on the hunt for a new job. Speaking of new jobs, I have one!! WHEEE!!! I just got my congrats letter and the date of my new employee orientation. On Friday I went to my pre-employment appointment. I got a PPD, a mini-physical, a urine drug test, pictured for a new badge and then got majorly bled for titers to make sure I'm immune to certain diseases. Anyway, I do have a picture of my wheel with Tom and Diane Golding so I'm going to post it for your viewing pleasure! Happy @#@!! Holidays!!!

Spongebob spin-a-thon!

This is a bit late posting this. On November 12th, Nickelodeon was having an all day Spongebob affair leading to their new episode of Spongebob, Atlantis Squarepantis. I missed out(ahem, ducked out more like) on the Knit-Olympics so I decided to make up for it by doing a Spongebob spin-a-thon. I had some brown baby alpaca that I had washed. So I decided that I would pick, card and then spin it into a two ply laceweight yarn. So here's the pics!:

The first picture is the baby alpaca in blanket form and the bottom is my Spongebob yarn!! It's not yellow, but it is the color of his pants!! Next up: VERMONT!!!! Saturday is Completion Day!! I'll be heading up to meet Tom Golding and finally see my custom wheel!!! I wanted it to be a surprise so I haven't seen hide nor hair of the wheel, but I'm sure it will be beautiful!! Pictures will be posted!! Oh, and an added bonus, the King Arthur Bakery Store is just an hour away from the Goldings, so added bonus!! I LOVE Vermont!!!!

I'm a special kind of stupid!!

Sometime last week, my last acquisition from the NY Sheep and Wool festival showed up via UPS. Here it is! A Patrick Green triple picker!! (And in the background you can see my other stepchild, a Strauch carder) It has about 640 sharp points and boy, are they sharp! It actually comes with a padlock so you can lock it up so people who don't know what it is or how to use it won't hurt themselves. Sounds great, right? Well, I really must be what most people would say, a special kind of stupid. I really hate to admit it, but the truth hurts sometimes.
Here's a picture of what I managed to do to myself within, oh, an hour of getting this bad boy all set up and ready to go:
It's kind of hard to see in this picture, but just below my first knuckle you'll see a red scar line going up from right to left. Now, I know, you're thinking, I was just careless and what do you expect with 640 sharped points? Well, you don't know how I managed to get this boo-boo. I got it, drum roll please, while putting the padlock back on the picker to lock it so no one would get hurt. I don't know how I managed to hurt myself trying to put the lock back on the picker and I'd really rather not try to recreate that just to see. I'll just take it as my stupidity and call it even!

Rest in peace...

RIP Ginger February 1991-November 3,2007

Happy Halloween!!!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM THE DEMON KITTY!!! BWAH HA HA HA!!!!

Rooting through dirty alpaca

After going to Rhinebeck, I found myself the proud owner of almost four pounds of baby alpaca. It didn't come from one alpaca, but rather two. One is a beautiful medium brown, very clean and it has a crimp to die for. Unfortunately, the second one is not so clean. There's VM and matted areas of mud (at least I hope it's mud) all through out the blanket. But it's this beautiful creamy white and then when they said they'd take 10% off because it was so dirty, I just couldn't resist! So I bought it. I'm just paying for it right now! It is really nice once I get it clean, it's creamy white, shiny and a wonderful crimp, but it's taking some major work to get it that way. Here's a couple of pics to show:
To the left is a picture of the fleece pre-me picking the extra VM and "stuff" off of it. I didn't know whether to try to pick stuff off of it before I washed it or after, so I went ahead and washed it in some Orvus paste and hot water. Thank God it didn't felt! It's hard to tell how dirty it still is with this small picture, but trust me, it still needs plenty of work! To the right
here, you'll see to efforts of my hard work!! It's a fluffy pile of alpaca-y goodness! This is after how many days? I washed it on October 23rd, now it's the 30th, so this has been a week of labor here. I'm not too sure how many ounces it is, I haven't weighed it. I'm hoping to continue my alpaca pick and hopefully soon, I'll be able to spin it up! Oh, and here's a picture of me in the middle of the alpaca pick!
Isn't my family room a complete mess??!! I wanted to do this outside, but for some unknown reason, Middletown is right smack in the middle of a wind tunnel. A wind tunnel that, I might add, only shows up when the temperature starts to dip, so it makes it just that much colder in the winter, but you get no relief during the summer. Makes sense doesn't it? Now, don't you want to move to Delaware? Behind me is one of my wheels, my Timbertop Jubilee. I love that wheel! I'm in the process of getting a custom wheel from Tom Golding that's supposed to be completed on December 1st. One of my high points of Rhinebeck was meeting him and his wife, Diane. I can't wait to visit their farm in Vermont when I go to pick up my wheel in December! Pictures will definitely be posted when that happens, but until then, the alpaca-pick continues!! I better not get hoof and mouth disease...or cutaneous anthrax...

Here's to a first post!

Okay. Here it is. My own blogger site. Chances are my blog will be either boring or not updated that often! Come back for more boredom!!