Knitting Obsession

Lookee what I made

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Originally uploaded by Suzannabanana.

Made this last weekend at my spinning class at Cloverhill Yarn Shop. It's a little skank of highly energized and uneven singles. Fun! I have the spinning bug but good now. I think next week I may take a day trip up to East Berlin to try out some more wheels at the Mannings. I kind of love the little Hitchhiker that's out.
I seem to have lost my blogging mojo. I'm way behind on my blogs and don't seem to have anything interesting to post! Here's hoping it comes back soon.
Have a happy and SAFE Memorial Day if you celebrate it!

7 things that no one knows about me

Denise tagged me for this meme, which is my first meme, and I am a little kerfluffled about how to go about answering it. 7 things! That's a lot! And I think I might have written about some of this before, but here goes:
1. I grew up in Hawaii. My parents were hippy-dippy types and decided to start a carnation farm with a friend, so they did...they were in San Francisco at the time and packed up a 3 year old (my brother) and a 3 month old (me) and moved to Maui. We moved from there when I was 8 and I remember very little about that time...I have vague memories of the house we had and my first memory is a party my parents had for the 1980 Super Bowl (I think...49ers v. Bengals...we were 49er fans from San Francisco).
2. When we moved to PA from HI, my parents were at a loss of what to do. They finally settled on opening a popcorn store (!) which was really fun....we had something like 80 or 90 flavors of popcorn along with treats and ice cream and pop. This was fun and a good way to earn a little spending money but was also a good way to earn some extra pounds. Not so good for a teenager! The store closed when I was in high school and now my parents have regular old jobs (actually, Daddy is retired, but Mom has your regular kind of job).
3. I took up crochet (and subsequently knitting) when I was trying to keep from resuming smoking. I quit smoking when I was living in Boulder, Colorado after a terrible viral illness that may have been meningitis. I was down for the count for about 2 weeks and once I was better...hadn't smoked in that whole time, so maybe I could try to not restart. A friend at work tried to teach me with crochet thread but I didn't really "get" it until I went to Jo-Ann's and got some Peaches and Cream cotton and bigger crochet hooks. Then I made about 40 million dishcloths (or maybe 20 or so) which I use every day. I thought Jo-Ann's was the pinnacle of good yarn and industriously built up a lovely stash of acrylic and wool blends, some of which still haunts my stash. I do remember stopping in a "real" yarn store one day to buy yarn for a crocheted afghan...the store was Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins and the yarn is Reynolds Saucy. Recently, I realized I wasn't going to finish the afghan, bound it off into a shawl, and bought more Saucy to (someday) make a Ribby Cardi.
4. I'm about as Taurus as they get.
5. I can't drive stick.
6. I'm deathly afraid of cockroaches. In fact, I really wish I hadn't looked at that link. Now I'm a little queasy and afraid to turn out the light.
7. I used to be in deep, passionate love with Optimus Prime. Does that make me weird?

I'm mailing out the packages for the contest winners tomorrow. Hope everyone likes their goodies!

sheep, sheep, sheep, and some wool

Warning! Lots of pictures ahead!
Ooh, I had fun last weekend. Saturday was my annual bday blowout and Sunday...

Look at that face! How can anyone resist?

This was my second Maryland Sheep and Wool. My first was in 2005 when I had been knitting for about 6 months. I didn't quite get what I was seeing then. But I got it this year, don't worry!

I had a lot of fun shopping for the prizes for the contest last week.

I was hoping to mail these out tomorrow, but I forgot the packing materials in my car today. So I will be mailing them on Thursday or Friday via USPS. I hope I was able to pick things out that are well suited to the recipients!
I actually didn't pick up too much for myself...there was one thing that I really wanted to get, and I got it...

A Bosworth Mini spindle, complete with tips and tricks from Sheila Bosworth herself. Be still my heart! It's made of Paduak and it spins beautifully, despite my clumsy hands. The fiber behind it is all BFL  which I have found to be really easy to spin. However I am still so bad at drafting.

Inconsistent, falling apart in places, nubs and slebs everywhere...grr! Isn't this supposed to be meditative and relaxing? I did get to try out a wheel for a second, a Kromski Minstrel, and I really liked that although it does seem there is a lot more going on. I'm taking a class in spinning on May 20th at Cloverhill and I hope to learn some good tips that I can take home to the spindle as well (speaking of Cloverhill, my B bought a gift certificate to there for me for my birthday...smart boy...and as he was spelling out my last name, they said "OH, yes. We know her." Scary? Or amusing? I feel amusing. I think B thought scary).
Check these cute sheep out...the one has some mighty scary horns.

And mama and babe, sleeping...

At least mama was sleeping. Babe was making an awful lot of noise. I also picked up the yarn I am going to use for my sockpalooooza pal:

Scarlet Fleece, Silk and Ivory in "olives and pimentos." This is a 50% merino, 50% silk blend and I will have a hard time giving it up. I am now trying to decide between patterns: Japanese Feather, Fluted Banister, and River Rapids (that link is a .pdf). Any thoughts?

Oh....you know, I just realized. I wasn't quite finished confessing showing off telling you about my relatively recent handpainted sock yarn acquisitions. These lovely ladies came a couple weeks ago.

Sweet Georgia superwash sock in "Spark,""Rusted,""Momiji," and "Snapdragon."

STR in "Fire on the Mountain." Seacoast Panda in "Ambergris." C*EYE*BER Fiber Merino/tencel in "Blood Orange." STR in "Pink Granite." Don't mind Brynn's tail there.

Claudia Handpainted in "Pistachio" and "Jill's Pinks."
The "Fire on the Mountain" deserves its own picture.

And lookie what my mum went and sent me for the bday.

I love this scale. It's a lot more accurate than the 1980s era postage stamp scale I've been using. Also, this!

Drool, drool. I think that's that. The only knitting going on is some lone socks. I have three individual socks waiting for mates and I am determined to finish those before I start anything new.

Contest winners!

Thank you all for entering! I really appreciate all of the creativity and energy you put into this. It was a lot of fun reading all the answers. First of, lots of people want to know the answer. It is not nearly as creative as some of your answers. When I was growing up, I started reading Betty Neels books. Betty Neels was a prolific author who wrote >150 books in her lifetime. They were almost all the same, with the basic storyline of a down-on-her-luck girl who was invariably mousy and unassuming, and who was usually a nurse. The hero was almost always a large, older, and yes, placid Dutchman who was a doctor and slowly, over the course of the book, swept the girl off her feet. The most passionate they ever got was a kiss on the lips...scandalous!  The stories always ended up in Holland and Betty Neels was famous for her descriptive passages which were so detailed that people actually can take trips to Holland and Friesland and follow the same roads that the characters did to see the houses she describes. I have almost all of the books, mostly originals from the 1960's through the 90's, and I always thought I would like to meet one of those placid Dutchman. Instead, I met a placid Slovak, who is just right.
The short answer, then, is that the URL is from my love of Betty Neels books. However, I kind of wish it was from Becka's extremely creative entry, which is detailed enough to rival any Betty Neels book:

You attended college @ FIT in NY,NY and your college roommate, Ann (Anneken as her Dutch parents called her) lived in Lake Placid. Sadly, your family was jetsetting in Milan during the Christmas break of your freshman year. Your roommate's family kindly invited you to join them for the break and their holiday festivities. You & your roommate arrived after traveling about 500 miles by car, she looked stunning (as always, even when she awoke!) you looked as if you had been traveling for 500 miles without a break, having left school after the last class on the last day before the break (in other words, your makeup was no more and your were wearing a baseball cap because your hair was a mess, yet you were still the cutest girl around!). Well, you entered her lovely home and were greeted by the best looking young man you had ever seen, her older brother, Andrew (called Andries by his Dutch parents) and your eyes locked and you had that moment, the one you have always remembered...when you fell in love at 1st site. So, you lovingly call your husband, Andries Brill, "The Placid Dutchman" which reminds you both of the way you met and fell in love.
I mean, come on! Is that straight out of a romance or what? Becka, you win the most creative answer prize!
Becka, coincidently, was also my 100th commenter. She agreed that it would be great to spread the love around, and so I am actually giving a prize to my 99th commenter, who was Denise. Please check out her blog; her writing is amazing!
Then I went to the random number generator to come up with the 3rd prize, which goes to Trek! She is also having a contest, so go along and check it out! Congratulations to all of you! I plan on having a good time picking out prizes at Maryland Sheep and Wool this weekend.