On the needles

I finally got to start something that isn't craft faire related or a commission. A friend of mine from high school is getting married and I am working on a shawl. It is the Swallowtail shawl from Interweave Knits. I am making it in a sock yarn that is a wool/ bamboo blend in a green and blue colorway. As soon as I get a good picture I will post it!

Maker Faire!

As some of you know Maker Faire is in San Mateo this weekend. No we don't have a booth, but yes we're going! And we're excited! You should be too, dag nabbit! I mean how can you not be excited about the world's largest and most comprehensive DIY/inventors' festival?

The coolest part? I GOT FREE TICKETS!!!

I'm the manager for a local pizzaria, but a sizable chunk of my responsibility is a 5-hour shift behind the counter Monday-Friday. Yesterday I was on the register taking delivery orders by phone as usual (bored out of my mind if it weren't for the kindle app on my ipod). A woman called in and said she needed a huge delivery to the San Mateo Event Center ASAP. She was feeding a set-up crew of 80+ people. On a hunch I asked what event she was working on. The answer: Maker Faire! I was super excited about that and gave them a discount for being awesome! (Well, technically for being an educational event but that's just what we're telling the boss-man, right?) After paying she says "I'm giving you a couple tickets so let your driver know to pick up an envelope from me." To which my response is naturally to jump up and down flail my arms and jibber gratefully at her! I may also have squeed. :P

That made my freakin day! C., f you read this THANK YOU!!!

Food Post!

Because food and yarn are totally the same thing.

Well, I haven't been working with fiber a lot (aside from almost finishing a pair or two of socks-- I'll post pictures someday, I swear!), but I have been cooking a lot!

This weekend, I went down to LA for my younger brother's college graduation (congratulations, Daniel!), and I stayed an extra day so that we could hang out. Well, one of the things that my brother and I like to do a lot is cook! So, we drove to the nearest nomful supermarket (they had pine nuts for $20/pound!! It's at least $35/pound up here! SO JEALOUS!), and ended up making scallops for lunch.

To be specific, we made baked scallops with prosciutto, pesto, and toast. (Or, you know, rustic pesto and pan-fried bread, if you're being pretentious. Which I sometimes am.) The pesto involved a lot of chopping (Daniel managed to cut himself somehow) because my brother's household doesn't own any sort of food processor. Then we cooked the scallops (sear and bake!), wrapped them in prosciutto, and put them and the pesto on toast.

It was incredibly delicious! I'm looking forward to cooking more with him this summer-- it should be a lot of fun.

The epic craft faire

So the craft faire adventure was epic. For starters, Napa is further than I understood. It is about 2 hours away. However, we had to come back Saturday night, which made the trip seem farther.

So our saga really begins Friday night. We had way too much to do in way too short a time. There were coffee runs, excellent chinese food, harsh words, heartfelt conversations, musicals, and maniacal giggling. We finally went to bed at 3 am, woke up at 6, finished measuring out yarn, packed up the car, picked up the Warebeast at 8, and headed out to Napa. After I took the wrong 80 and ended up on the bay bridge, we had to turn around on Treasure Island.

Now, I have lived in Northern California for 6 years, and have family who live in Berkeley so I have crossed the Bay Bridge several times. I have always wondered what Treasure Island was and rather than look it up, I made up an elaborate story in my head about it. Well, it turns out that Treasure Island is a tiny stretch of land, with a lot of cops, slow speed limits, and about a million cement mixers. Ok. Maybe not a million, but the fact is that we passed 4 cement truck in 5 minutes. The weirdest thing is that they were all going different directions.

So, after we stop at Freya's mom's house to pee, Warebeast takes over driving, since he has gotten a full night of sleep and has a much better since of direction than I do. Freya and I continue to skein balls of yarn in a desperate attempt to get ready. We finally get to the venue about an hour later than we anticipated, which we think is when the faire begins. Turns out it didn't begin until noon, so we had another hour. We get everything labeled and set out and waited. And waited. We sold a few things, packed up, drove home. Freya fell asleep when we got home and sleep for 12 hours. Warebeast and I had some fries and then followed suit. We got up the next morning and rinsed and repeated. This time without Warebeast and substituting the Boy. And of course less getting lost.

On Sunday, there were baby goats. 5 days old. They were wonderful. The faire seemed to go better on Sunday. More people took cards etc. The ride home was uneventful and we slept normally. Now, we just have to get the house recovered from the month of prep!

Frustration, Fun, Fumes and FOOTNOTES!

OOF! Dye fumes are all in my head and my brain, while the muddle of color and swirls is really pretty, its not really helping me stay on topic. It's entirely possible that I won't be entirely coherent in writing this. See, I've already been redundant at LEAST twice! In an effort to keep my tangents from destroying the coherency of my post, I have added footnotes.

I spent ALL DAY yesterday dying and carding and dying and carding. It was AWESOME.

Remember that GIANT bag of stinky unwashed fleece that Riastiltskein and I washed a few weeks back? Well, we're still working on that but, now(1) we have a drum carder!!! Sort of. It is a drum carder and it is awesome and all the pieces are there but, and it's a big but(2), the drive band is stretched beyond use. As a result I'd need to have three or four hands to run it efficiently. I'm managing though. It takes me substantially longer to card a full batt than it ought to but it sure is nice to be able to blend the fleece evenly and card it into big batts rather than the tiny ones we get off our impromptu hand-carders(3). It's not a brand-name drum carder so I'm gonna have an interesting time trying to find a band that fits it properly... That's an adventure for a later date.

All my carding was between dyeings which was my main focus yesterday and also the cause of my befuddlement(4). I dyed about 10 small batched of roving in different colors to card together into batts for the "Learn to Spin" kits I'm building for our upcoming DIY fair in Napa, CA. I've been using three different dyes each with a different fixing agent so the smell of our apartment was... interesting, to say the least. I can hardly wait to have a place with a yard that I can set up a dedicated dying table in(5). We had all the windows open but I'm pretty sure that wasn't enough.
My brain may not be up for math or logic today but I'm already plotting more dying tomorrow.

I keep promising pics of all the neat stuff we're cooking up, but I seem to have thoroughly misplaced the charger for my camera. I'll have to steal the Boy's so I can document some of these beautiful colors here(6). Look for more updates in the next week as we work our fingers raw to get ready for the InDIYpendent Culture Faire.

(1)Cue fanfare!
(2)I do NOT like big butts and I might be lying about that any other time I say it.
(3)They're two dog brushes bought at petsmart. While it might have been a good idea if we were just fluffing up some roving, they are unfortunately not made to withstand the wear and tear of carding this volume of knotted fleece en masse. Go figure.
(4)Ooh! Shiny! Aw...it's just a gum wrapper...damn. See? 'Train of Thought' has not only been derailed but has forgotten that it needs those rails and has continued to speed down the hill at breakneck speeds.
(5)Keeping in mind that this may be years off, I really do wonder how much of my brain will be left by then. At least It'll be the prettiest thing on the autopsy table. They'll cut my open and go "Holy, hopping unicorns! This girls insides are sparkly rainbows, and she has the full palate in her skull instead of a brain. No wonder she produced such nifty color-weighs. Unfortunately cause of death was a spectral overdose." Did I mention I watched a lot of Bones and Castle yesterday too?
(6) I'm of the "Pics, or it didn't happen" mentality. Probably because of my crappy memory.

Baseball Game

Yesterday Hedgerose and I met up and had a wonderful day! She called me a few days ago and told me that her father had gotten tickets to Saturday's Giants game but couldn't go so she had free tickets. She took the train up from Santa Cruz and I got on the same train up in San Carlos. We got off the train and walked over to the ferry building. Now, since Hedgerose usually puts her foodie posts on her personal blog, you might not know that she is a complete and total foodie. So the Ferry Building was like she had died and gone to heaven. We walked around the whole building and looked at everything. We got there a little too late and missed the farmer's market, but it was still excellent. There is a whole booth for salted pig parts, which I thought was hysterical, as that was the actual name. I didn't get anything there, having headed down the herbivore path, but I did get this amazing cheese at the Cowgirl Creamery. It was a creamy spread with apricots and walnuts in it. Hedgerose got some hard cheese as well and we took all our booty back to the game.

We gave ourselves a lot longer to walk back from the Ferry Building but when we got back to the stadium, there was a huge line to get in. When we finally got up to the front, it turned out that they were giving out bobble-heads of Pablo Sandival. So I got one.

Now, I grew up a Dodgers fan. My dad always listened to the games on the radio and we went to a game every year. I feel that baseball is one of those things that you are born into, like religion or politics. Now there are always converts, but often, it is a tradition that you are filling. We root for the Dodgers because my dad listened to games with his grandfather. It is a family tradition. So, when I went to the Giants (the hated ones) game, I felt vaguely dirty. Like I was cheating or something. I had a great time, but it only helped that guilty feeling get bigger. All and all, it was a wonderful day.

Announcement

I know we have been kind of quiet over here and the etsy hasn't been updated in a while, but we have been working on something. We have offically been invited to be in the inDIYpendent culture faire in Napa on May 15 and 16th.

Here is the offical blurb: This two-day, family-friendly event celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (D.I.Y.) movement and embraces all art forms. There will be a marketplace of craft and food vendors, art installations, stages for performances, live sidewalk art, workshops, and information booths. 100% of proceeds go to the Community Venue Project to make space for alternative art in Napa.

Check our fan page ( http://tinyurl.com/y7ktwjj ) for updates and details on schedules and participants.

We have been running around getting the paper work filled out, (Hello San Francisco and your $3 for 15 minutes parking) and building up inventory. We will be adding a few new items, most notably a spindle kit. Come check us out!