Tuesday, October 11, 2011

A place in the sun

Last night I stayed up too late reading The New Yorker (September 26, 2011 issue) and was a little horrified to come upon a cartoon by Roz Chast (page 90) that breaks down blogs into three groups, of which one is "stories about crap somebody cooked, knitted, or sewed.' (spoiler: the other two are conspiracy theories and self-promotion.)

So today I will not be writing about anything I knitted.  Ready?

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At the beginning of the summer, I was taking my spinning wheel out to the porch every morning for an hour or two, so it made sense for me to bookend the season by doing that in the afternoons over the crazy-warm long weekend we just had.

(This is technically true, but what gave me the idea was not Balance but the sight of a ball of previously-spun yarn waiting in a teacup for its partner, while hunting the china cabinet for props with which to upgrade my Thanksgiving dining experience through the miracle of Presentation.  And yes, I did mess up said dinner by spinning just a bit too far from the aroma of burning, but apparently not so much as to be beyond the reach of what a nice tablecloth can achieve.)

There was just one catch: I'd already taken advantage of the warm and sunny weather we had to put away all the summer furniture and cart the permanent stuff up onto the porch to be out of the worst of the snow come winter.  Still.  Worth a try, right?


Right.  And it turns out the permanent furniture is So Much Better for spinning than the summer stuff.  Those chairs are just regular patio table chairs with ugly but super squashy cushions on them, so you'd think they'd be ideal. Especially since you're not looking at the pattern when you're sitting on it.  But I always had back and shoulder pain after spinning, which did not happen this weekend when leaning back in the old Adirondack/Muskoka style chair.

Which looks like this after nearly 15 years of use.


Oh dear.  I so should have taken the time to restain these again over the summer, though I think the blond areas on that one arm are actual rot.  I let the porch go entirely too, and it really needed floor paint.

Anyway: new favourite thing, just when the chair is falling apart and the weather is about to turn nasty.  GO ME.

In good news: I got through the second lump of fiber, and didn't wait to ply the yarn:


This is the bamboo/tencel/merino blend I bought from Waterloo Wools at the Kitchener-Waterloo Knitter's Fair.  It was tricky to get my wheel set up for the slipperiness of the bamboo, and I seem to have produced still more bulky yarn as a result, but hey! it's even! and it's green, and it's done.

* * * * *

There.  I didn't write about anything I cooked, knitted, or sewed, and the eagle-eyed among you will have noticed I didn't really write so much about spinning either.  Nope.  I wrote about a CHAIR.  Ha!

1 comment:

Kathleen Taylor said...

Chairs are important, y'all