the girly who shall end all girls

as with everyone who gets an expensive new thing, i am boringly obsessed with home improvements. ( window treatments )

It rained. A lot. So much mud.

Fortunately, Mom (who didn’t want to ruin her sneakers) suggested that we look for rain boots last night. It’s rural enough here that there was a Tractor Supply Co a short drive away, and cute patterned rubber boots were a whole $20. Totally worth it. Our feet stayed warm and dry and I made sure to go to every damn vendor in a tent because they were not having a nice day.

I shopped victoriously: a store had the level winder attachment for my e -spinner that has been out of stock from the manufacturer for some time. It cost a little more than my EEW6 did, but everyone at the spin-in tonight assured me that it was going to change my life :D

I got to see the Neighborhood Fiber Co peeps in person (I bought their merch, Mom bought their yarn). I was sad that the Ketanji Brown Jackson colorway was a blue I would never use (and I honored mimerki’s request to not bring them yarn).

My spinning class got me fired up about color blending so I bought some fiber with that in mind. We only stayed through mid afternoon today - the cold damp was hard on Mom’s joints and honestly I was tired too - walking through squishy mud in rubber boots uses some muscles I don’t usually engage in city life. So while we were lolling in the hotel room I knit my last sample yarn into a single scant fingerless mitt instead of a swatch. I love it and it makes me more excited about my idea for the fiber that I bought.

Dinner ran a little later than planned but I still got back to the fairgrounds for most of the Saturday night spin-in. I missed almost all of the contests and drawings (event advertised for three hours, all giveaways happened in hour one). I made fast friends with my power strip and ended up in a group of five random folks - 3 EEW6, 1 Sidekick (my treadle wheel at home), and one DIY wheel. The DIY was a determined high schooler - she learned on a borrowed Louet and decided to repro it in wood shop because she didn’t have money. So she did, including 3D printing her bobbins and painting both sides of the wheel. The kids are alright. The other EEW peeps were an immigrant from Gothenburg Sweden and someone who spends the winter mushing her Malamutes. The Sidekick person grows her own indigo and does shibori. Spinners are a bunch of weirdos and I love them.

Also got to squee today with someone about buying knitting nerd Tee Turtle shirts at gaming and comics conventions (we feel so seen), and a couple passing comments about the SHIELD patch on my jacket.

We also saw some sweet sheep being combed, trimmed, and fluffed for the show ring. Surprise highlight at the end of the day: bakery stand by the gate with delicious flavored scones (I had lemon-ginger, Mom had cranberry-orange. We’ve determined that tomorrow with start with those instead of ending with them.)

Hopefully tomorrow Mom will be up for standing through the sheep dog demos. (SHEEP DOG DEMOS!) And maybe some of the sheep to shawl competition.

oh lawd it's hot, we're sitting in the dark as still as possible. (no air conditioning, it's 98F right now and it will be hotter tomorrow and Monday. the last time it got this hot here was in 2009.) the dog is at daycare in the ac until later in the evening - they're not doing any afternoon walks today because they're worried about burning pupper feet on the hot sidewalk. i got a haircut this afternoon, and impulse-bought gelato for C and me on the way home. it was a race against time - with a cup of gelato in each hand, both melting and dripping like mad, me licking up what drips i could while walking home as fast as i could and trying not to get chocolate on my clothes.

fortunately there was someone in the elevator to punch buttons and C had the door propped open to the hall so it wasn't TOO hard to get home and shove the cups into the freezer before i washed my hands. i suspect there's gelato all over my keys and in my purse, but it was worth it. C had Theo chocolate and Hawaiian macadamia hazelnut, and i had lemon meringue pie and bourbon vanilla.

***
i haven't written for a while because i didn't want to write about my dead parent feelings. i was able to talk about a nice memory of Dad without getting upset while i was getting my hair cut today, so that was good and getting better, i think. (C tells me that he got surprise grief every so often for a few years, so i will just need to roll with that.) the memory was that before i was in school full time i used to go along with Dad when he got his hair cut - old school barbershop where you walk in and then hang out and shoot the shit until a chair is open for you. they always had comic books, and those are my first memories of reading comics.* all this spurred by my stylist's Barbicide jar which appears to be completely unchanged in the intervening years.
* * *

i spun a self-striping true three-ply yarn from two space dyed braids of BFL wool, which i was not really skilled enough to do and will probably not attempt again for a long time. it involves a lot of weighing and being extremely consistent...and ultimately being willing to break the plies and edit when things just aren't lining up. but it's done now and in the ball it is very much what i hoped, the kind of gradual transition between the color bands that you get in Noro but a three-ply. i probably should feature it in a sweater since it will wear hard, but i'm looking at some sideways shawls that i'm more likely to wear.




*and the ubiquitous Hostess ads which apparently dates me pretty exactly

I WANT TO BE OUTSIDE. i've eaten lunch on the balcony for the past two days, absorbing the sun and hungrily watching the one daffodil bud swell larger and larger and get yellower and yellower. maybe tomorrow, probably Friday.

my new tent has shipped! also for the camping season, a replacement solar lamp arrived today and fancy insulated camp mugs are on order. CAMPING.

i backed the kickstarter for the EEW 6, an electric spinning wheel.* i really like the ethos of the inventor and he has a great track record and a very active community, also it really hit a sweet spot for price. it was supposed to arrive in February, but yunno, 2020. folks in the Discord (yes, there's a Discord) are starting to share unboxing and WIP pictures. my backer number is in the 1500s and i'm on the other side of the country so it will be a while before i see mine. one of my other 2020 purchases was a subscription to Spin Off, which now includes the digital archive in your regular subscription, so i've got that on the iPad and will be coming up with Yarn Ideas until the EEW finally comes.

Washington is opening up vaccination to everyone over 16 on April 15. i am annoyed that you can't seem to sign up for an appointment unless you're in the current wave, seems like a recipe for crashing every booking site in a couple weeks, but what-ever. it's still much sooner than expected and i am thrilled.



*i love my Sidekick, which is already small and portable for a spinning wheel, but the espinner offers even more portability - i'd like my Mom to see me spinning, maybe take it to a coffee shop in the after times - and it has ridiculously large bobbins.

making bath bombs continues to be the current craft obsession. my cosmetic dyes & lakes have arrived and the first attempt at color is drying now.

today i ordered more citric acid, polysorbate 80, and fragrance oil samples. i also got some knockoff labware pipettes and microscoops.

things i've learned:

• my taste in fragrance samples is so...me. (it's all aspirational/firing in the dark since i can only go on descriptions.) like i read the names off and C laughed. look, if they actually get anywhere near "bonfire" or "cinnamon roll" i'm going to be extremely happy.

• Edmonds Scientific has gone out of business. i loved that catalog so much when i was a kid and i thought they would always be around.

• i looked at buying real borosilicate pipettes from Fisher and was not prepared to spend a few hundred dollars on a case of 12. so i'll deal with some cheap glass knockoffs, it's not like i'm making medications - it hurts me how inexpensive and convenient it would be to get one-time plastic ones with integrated bulbs to throw away.

• of the three libraries i have access to, the one with the DIY bath books is the one that includes Island County. coincidence? i think not. also, all three of the books i got out turned out to be slim, free of any reference to chemistry or safety, and heavy on the girl power and/or crappy woo. ("sisterpreneurs" shudder, "baths" for each star sign that - if you read more than one - used the same recipe repeatedly.)

• it feels like the people who talk about bath bombs on the internet are all white women with everything that comes with that (see book cringe above). it turns out that using mooncake press molds to shape bath bombs is a thing. and hey, they're gorgeous and look like fun to use. but i feel like it smacks of cultural appropriation and somehow that conversation doesn't seem to have happened (or at least it didn't blow up enough for google to index it). i have fond memories of mooncakes shared by co-workers over the years during the Mid-Autumn Festival. i've been thinking about it on and off all afternoon; i think mostly it bothers me that white people are selling them and seem oblivious to what the press was made for.

i used to have a reasonably-sized set of Wilton gel colors that i used for dying yarn/fiber (and occasionally food). not that i can find them now. C thinks that i might have purged them at one point since we do live across the street from JoAnn's.

this is to say that i was plotting the next batch of bath bombs and thought i might try adding some color, and surely gel food color would be an appropriate choice since it wouldn't add water to the mixture? i did a little research and it turns out that it's better that i didn't find them - dye for uses where it may contact your delicate bits must pass more stringent safety testing than dye you can eat. ("lip safe" is chemically less irritating than "food safe".) technically i can make food-colored ones for myself, but i shouldn't give them away and it's illegal to sell them. since i'm sensitive to a random assortment of chemicals i probably shouldn't chance it.

so now there's a sampler of two different types of lip safe cosmetic colorants coming my way.

so it turns out that bath bombs are like making a volcano - acid + base + binding and coloring. the reaction is activated when it gets wet. most interesting thing in the kit from my POV was Polysorbate 80 - this is an emulsifier that keeps the contents of the bomb distributed in the bathwater and helps to keep it from adhering to the tub.

the kit called for the mixture to be colored with mica and then some surface painting with mica (mixed with alcohol). i packed the molds firmly, maybe more firmly than i was supposed to since the mixture made one bomb less than they suggested. my bombs are much firmer than commercial ones.

in the tub the fizziness was great, very long lasting. i choose to believe that was because of the higher density. the bombs are light purple in color with dark purple, pearly white, and gold paint; still there was very little color in the water. (honestly that's fine with me, i don't care for staining the tub.) the softness of the water was great. the scent was pleasant but not overpowering.

anyway, making them was fun, like packing molds with sand to build a sandcastle. the messiest thing was the mica coloring, which i wouldn't do again anyway. i ordered base ingredients for more and will make many fizzy smelly things with no added color.

i volunteered to do the last dog walk of the day and let C finish watching his soccer match, which means podcast time.

tonight it was Fiber Nation, on Gunnister Man (there's plenty of text and links on the landing page if you don't feel inclined to listen). basically a beautifully preserved set of wool clothes were found in an isolated peat bog in the Shetland Islands in the 50s; the person who had worn the clothes had rotted away, but the clothes remained. the podcast is the story of the painstaking effort to recreate the clothing for display in a local museum, and what the clothing and its composition can tell us about where this unknown person came from and why they might have been in the middle of nowhere in the first place.

the masks with the stretch fabric on the top edge worked well today, but the stretch knit ties tend to either untie themselves or knot up too firmly to untie easily. we also found them to be the warming equivalent of wearing a hat.

after yesterday's mask post, i got some useful info:

• via mimerki: how to keep your glasses from fogging while wearing a mask


• via umadoshi: how to make a stretch jersey headband

mark 3.5 is the JoAnn "denim mask" (instructional video with link to printable pattern template) in two layers of quilting cotton or quilting cotton/old flannel shirt with the stretch jersey headband referenced above, top edge of the headband placed where the top ties would be placed. (no stretch fabric on the top edge since the even pressure of the headband makes for a firm but not uncomfortable seal against the nose and cheekbones.)

buhrger asked about the "big head" grading i referenced in the previous post. i made the mask ~2cm wider and taller. the pattern has one piece (cut two and center seam per layer) so i continued the line ~1cm in width and ~2cm in height. this takes the bottom past C's chin and short beard. fortunately we're not trying to get a respirator seal here.

today i made a Discord for my weekly knitting group. i am looking forward to seeing knitta P, who is off being in college on the other side of the mountains.