Hello again, my dearie dears! I hope the beautiful October weather is everything you’ve been dreaming about all this time. I know it is for me!
Anyway, I thought I’d have some fun with something new…a coupon! A coupon for you! Yeah, you, I see you there, looking sheepish. I know I’ve been on this painting and embroidery kick for a while, but this website started out as a site for showcasing a bunch of my handspun art yarns. Recently I’ve been spinning more again, and realizing I could use a bit more space for the new yarns. And that’s when the coupon comes in!
Basically it goes like this: If you’re in the US and you purchase more than $75 worth of yarn, and type “yarn75us” at checkout, you get free Priority shipping. (And also a happy fistful of postcards, because why not?) This coupon only works once per shopper, but I’ll keep the offer going for a while.
I just hope it’ll be a little helpful, for people wanting something really pretty to play with on their needles, and it’ll help me make room for more fall and winter yarns. There’s a few knits going into the shop soonish too, which will be nice. And of course, more paintings, embroidery and amusing miscellany…
It’s been a hectic month, with not much posting from Yours Truly. I have a pretty good excuse, though–I got married! And so far, married life is pretty wonderful, with loads of great surprises. And more than a little paperwork. Eh, whaddaya do?
Anyway, I thought it might be nice to get some normal Maus stuff back on track, and dyed up some roving this morning. A coworker had given me her late mother’s fiber stash, along with several very nice balls of white milled wool. They looked like they would take dye very well, so I mixed up some black and red Jaquard dyes for a nice blended black-cherry sort of thing…
The roving turned out really nice, good and saturated!
While I was adding the red dyes, the pot looked rather…ominous…
What’s in that pot, Maus? What is it? Wool, you say? You sure? It looks…not good…
Sure enough, the minute I put up the photo on my facebook page, all my friends started weighing in with, “That looks…gory!” “It looks like brains!” “Entrails!” “Don’t lie to us, Ms Maus, you put brains in there, didn’t you?” “Brains!!”
So, for the record, I did not stick brains, entrails, or any other unnatural substance in with my lovely, gory looking wool. Because then it would be terribly sticky and hard to clean. Also hard to spin and knit. Gore is nobody’s friend in the fiber arts, my darlings. Though what goes into my gumbo recipes? Wellllll…
It’s been a little while since I posted here. Life just got a little more hectic recently, with projects and and whatnot. I also…heh…got engaged. I’m very happy about it all. Of course, now I’m thinking about things I’d never really considered before. Are there registries that aren’t specifically full of beige-colored towels? (Apparently there are. I still have to go digging around for them, though.) What will I do about a dress? How much cake? What kind of cake? And how many Gothly decorations can I bust out at the reception? (Quite a few, actually.) Do I change my name, and to what? Sadly, even though it would be perfectly legal, my sweetie put his foot down at being called Mr. and Mrs. Dracula. *sigh* Another dream shot down…
Meanwhile, a dear friend of mine brought me a very interesting bag. Cornelia had been traveling through Scotland recently, and spent some time happily wandering around the sheep-filled heather, plucking bits of wool off the fences here and there. People used to do this sort of thing all the time to get a little wool to spin up; it’s the original meaning of the term, “woolgathering.” When she came home, she presented me with a nice fully Ziplock full of soft plushy wool…
A wonderful bag full of Scottish fluff!
The wool smelled wonderful, all heathery and peaty. I kept inhaling the scent while Cornelia told me with a grin, “That, my dear, is what Scotland smells like!” Scotland smells this good? Wowwwww… I gleefully showed off my bag to my boss at work, who is very pro-Scotland. After happily squishing the wool and huffing it, he asked if he could keep a pinch, for the innate Scottishness. Of course I let him. How often do you get to snort another country at work and have it be legal?
So now I’ve been spinning it all up. I hand-carded the wool that very night, and chose my nice heavy Ashford spindle to do my spinning. For some reason spindle spinning just seemed right with something like this. The sort of thing someone would do while walking a hedgerow, woolgathering…
A spindle full of Scotland! Well, maybe not full, not yet…
What will I do with the yarn once I’m done spinning? Hard to say. I’m guessing once plied up there will be enough for maybe a couple of sachet bags or some cool cabled bracelets. If I need more, I’ll have to talk Cornelia into going back to Scotland to gather some more wool for me. I may have to go with her, for ummm…quality control. Yeah. That’s it…
I took a little time off this week for dyeing more wool and various putterings. It’s hot and sunny out, which is perfect for drying lots and lots of fiber…I was also trying my hand at dyeing a fistful of silk cocoons a friend of mine gave me to play with. They looked a little more sinister than I’d expected, blobbing around in a jar of blue-green tinted water with a hint of pink. Lots and lots and lots of fluff out drying in the sun…with a sinister jar of blobbyness…
Everything looks so wholesome in the photo except for that weird jar. What’s in it? Olives? Eyeballs? It didn’t help that the silk threads kept trying to attach to each other and they came out in a creepy globby green mass that stuck to my hand. It was like running into a spider web, except I’d done it to myself on purpose. But the cocoons turned out a pretty shade of lime, so it was worth it…
Also, I decided there weren’t enough creepy candles at my house, so I bought a few more. there’s an Etsy shop called Darknessvoid that offers wonderful spine-candles. (I developed a crush on them when I saw these huge, flickering spine-candles in Prisoner of Azkaban.) I thought I’d try a smallish one first before investing in one of the full-sized ones. There were also some great skull-candles to keep my crystal skull-head company… They all look like they’re singing to me…I’m not sure I want to hear what the song is, exactly.
Between the dyeing, carding, spinning and mercenary knitting I’m quite the busy thing lately. It’s a good thing; it’s why I went part-time at my day job; to have a little more time for money-makers that soothe me and make me happy. Just looking at all the fiber I dyed up made me so happy. So many colors! such great textures! And it was all for me to play with…
And today? I wonder if I can stick a few more cocoons in the dyeing jar, just for more globby fun…
