Drew's new car

Yes, Drew got a new car. He sold the big Ford F250 diesel that we loved, but it was not a practical commute car and was impossible to park in downtown Sacramento. Unless one parked it on top of another vehicle. Which only earns one tickets.

So, after much cruising of the automall and bringing hope to the hearts of many a car salesman we went to Senator Mazda in Sacramento and they had the exact car Drew has been drooling over for a while now. The Mazda speed 3. Not just the regular Mazda 3, oh no. This is the one with the turbo and 260 horsepower. In a hatchback! It's a really cool car, and we can fit all three kids in the back!! Yippee!! We are taking it on a family drive this morning.

second skein, drying under tension

Second skein finished yesterday. I was a bit more aggressive with the yarn while it soaked, but didn't employ Judith Mackenzie McCuin's potato masher method. I am working with a medium staple length fiber right now, and the crazy agitation is meant more for shorter staple length fibers like yak, buffalo, and alpaca. I also dried this skein under a bit of tension, as you can see in the picture. I improvised with my kids' clothes hangers! (The other pic is of the skein before washing.) Drying under tension, or not, seems to be a matter of choice among spinners. I like the finished product, or it could be that my second skein is better than my first! I have a few areas of overspin in this skein, though. I can't wait until I get good enough to have reliable, consistent results.

Denise Raasch will be coming this weekend, and I plan to give her a few spinning "lessons", both on her drop spindle and on my spinning wheel. At least she appreciates my hobby! She will be the recipient of most of my yarn, as she is much better at crocheting than I. I need her to learn how to knit! :)

I also have some merino on the bobbin right now. I get good results spinning merino from the fold, but I still have some thick-and-thin issues with it. Practice, practice!!

Emma will be 6!!

This Sunday, June 1st, is Emma's sixth birthday! Where has the time gone? She will be in first grade in just a few months, and Elsa will be in kindergarten. Evan will be two on June 30th. Yikes! They are growing up.

We are having an Emma/Evan combo birthday party at Pump It Up, an indoor bounce house place here in town. This will be the last of the big birthday bashes. We can't afford it anymore! :)

Here are a few pictures of all three of them for your reminiscing pleasure.

Parts of the spinning wheel

Ashford Elizabeth

These are the common parts found on a traditional spinning wheel. The arrangement of these parts may vary from wheel to wheel.

A. Fly Wheel - The wheel that rotates when treadling and causes the other various parts to operate.

B. Drive Band - A cord that goes around the fly wheel and the flyer whorl.

C. Flyer - A U-shaped piece of wood with hooks lined up on one or both arms. The hooks are used to store the yarn evenly on the bobbin. The flyer is rotated by the drive band which as a result puts the twist into the fiber.

D. Flyer Whorl - A pulley attached to the flyer and operated by the drive band. The different sized grooves on the flyer whorl determine how fast the wheel will spin.

E. Maidens - The upright posts that hold the flyer and the bobbin.

F. Mother-Of-All - The bar that mounts the maidens, flyer, bobbin, and tension knob.

G. Tension Knob - Used to adjust the tension of the drive band by lowering or raising the mother-of-all.

H. Bobbin - Rotates on the spindle along with the flyer and stores the yarn. It can operate with or independent of the drive band.

I. Treadle - The pedal(s) that operates the wheel by using your feet.

J. Footman - The bar the connects the treadle to the fly wheel and causes it to turn.

K. Orifice - The opening at the end of the spindle where the yarn goes through to connect to the hooks of the flyer.

I got this information from the Joy of Handspinning website, which has lots of great information. Videos, too, and many more pictures of spinning techniques, wheels, and spindles. I have two more bobbins ready to be plied tonight. Yay!

Spinning glossary

It has been brought to my attention (thanks Carolina!) that most of you have no idea what I am talking about regarding the spinning. So, I'm posting an abbreviated spinning glossary. Here goes:

Carders – Usually hand cards are referred to as simply carders. Two large area brushes similar to those used for dogs and have wire bristles. The fiber is run through the carders and this opens them, cleans them, and also aligns them for easy drafting.

Carding – This is the process of opening and using a carding technique for preparing fibers for spinning or felting. This can refer to hand cards, drum carders or even mechanically carded fibers and rovings and batts.

Drafting – The process of pulling on the fibers and feeding them from the drafting hand to the spinning hand. The drafting hand manages the fiber thickness and the spinning hand manages the twist.

Drop Spindle – This is a spindle that you hold in the air, and as you draft the fibers and spin the yarn, the spindle drops down and the yarn forms. You then wind on the yarn you made and repeat the process. There are high whorl or low whorl drop spindles.

Felt / Felting – The process of intertangling fibers by making layer of carded fibers and adding hot water and agitation or by using special felting needles. The end result is felt much like you would purchase in a craft store.

Fiber – Fiber refers to any type of thing that can be spun into a thread or yarn. It encompasses everything from horse hair to dryer lint. If it can be made into yarn, you can call it fiber.

Lanolin - The greasy, sticky coating on wool before it has been washed. Purified lanolin may be purchased to treat garments to keep them waterproof, or it is also good for chapped lips, dry skin and diaper rash.

Lazy Kate - Used to hold bobbins with singles so that they can be plied together on the spinning wheel or spindle.

Leader - A length of yarn that is attached to the bobbin, it is used as a starter yarn to spin new yarn by joining onto the leader.

Niddy Noddy - An interesting contraption that allows you to hand wind a skein of a specific yardage, usually 1, 1.5 or 2 yards. The finished skein can be counted for an accurate yardage of the finished skein.

Plied Yarns - When you spin a bobbin of fiber you have a single spun yarn. When this is spun again with a second third or more singles in the opposite direction the singles were first spun, it is a plied yarn. Plied yarns have less pilling and are also more durable, particularly for knitted garments.

Roving - A long strand of carded fiber that is a long rope of ready to spin fiber.

Scotch Tension - A wheel with one drive band that is attached to the flyer, and another tensioned band that goes over the other end of the bobbin. When the spinner moves their hands forward, the band causes the bobbin to stop spinning and the flyer winds they newly spun yarn around the bobbin. When tension is returned to the yarn in the spinners hands, the bobbin begins to spin at the same speed as the flyer.


Singles - One individual strand of spun yarn. These may be plied together or used as they are. These are sometimes referred to single ply yarn.

Staple Length - The length of a lock of wool from a fleece. Some long-wool breeds can have staple lengths of over 12 inches. Shetlands usually have a staple from 3-6 inches, while Merinos have a staple from 2 - four inches, depending on how often they are shorn.

Slubby Yarn - The lumpy bumpy slubby yarn that can be so lovely in projects, this yarn has a varied thickness and lends the finished fabric a unique look and feel. This is often similar to what a beginner spins, excepting that the beginner isn't usually trying to produce slubs.

Flyer - The U shaped housing for the bobbin, usually it has hooks on it for the yarn to feed through. This is what adds the twist to the yarn, and also causes it to be wound onto the bobbin.

I hope this clears up a little bit of what I'm talking about. I'll do a post about parts of the spinning wheel next. hopefully I'll convert some of you to spinners. :)

Nevada City and Grass Valley

Happy Memorial Day!

We took Olivia and headed up into the mountains. We had breakfast in Nevada City and then back down to Grass Valley for some park fun. Here are some pictures; if you click on them you can see them larger. Enjoy!

I'm Mohair!

http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/pottercraftnews/fiberquiz/index.html


I took this quiz and ended up being Mohair. Uh, is that good or bad?!



Hmmm...the pics aren't showing up. Oh, well. I'm sure you all don't care anyhow.

Today is my Dad's birthday. Happy birthday dad! The girls made him a rather interesting birthday card. Emma drew a little picture of everyone except her baby brother, who was annoying her at the time. Revenge.

Rainy Run

Chris Garcez and I ran this morning in the light rain, and it felt so nice after last week's 100+ degree temperatures. I only did two miles this morning, but I ran the first one in 9 minutes 40 seconds, and the second one in 9 minutes 18 seconds. Yeeha! That's my fastest two miles since I began running. Too bad I couldn't pull that off at last Saturday's race.

Our friends the DuPonts have left, and we are settling in for the long Memorial Day weekend. No school on Monday...Yay!

County Fair

Emma's kindergarten class, and apparently every other class of children in the Sacramento area, went to the county fair today. It was only open to school tours today, but it was just as crowded as a normal day--only the crowd was made up almost entirely of kids. Yikes!

Anyhow, we saw horses, sheep, pigs, bunnies, birds, and smelled all kinds of wonderful fair food. I didn't get a chance to take too many pictures, but we got a good one of a 4-H member grooming her Columbia sheep for show. The kids had a blast, too.

Saw lots of raw wool in bags for the contest tomorrow. Very nice fleeces! All roped off, though, so no chance of checking them out. Bummer.

finished skein

My finished skein! It was dry this morning, and I twisted it into the neat little package you see above. It's too small of an amount to do anything with, and a little think-and-thin, but it's yarn. Yay! I plan to try and make at least a skein a week until I get some REAL yarn, I mean yarn that people would want to use for knitting or crochet. :)
Emma's kindergarten class goes to the Sacramento county fair tomorrow to see the animals. I can't wait to see all the different yarn on the hoof! I'll post pics here of that tomorrow. Also, our dear friends Carolina and Rory DuPont are coming tomorrow afternoon to spend the weekend with us. Yay! We haven't seen them since January. We are so excited! It should be a fun weekend.

I have made yarn!

I stayed up late last night, and plied my two skimpy bobbin-fulls of my corriedale cross singles. The attached lazy kate on my sonata worked just fine, but now I see why people get the jumbo flyer! I'll have to skim off some grocery money for one of those bad boys. I meant to take pics of my yarn on the bobbin, but that particular bobbin didn't spin very well, so I wanted to get it off and get it oiled again. My two bobbins, which were not full, almost filled up my third bobbin when plied! Yikes!

I also did not measure or weigh anything; this was purely an experiment.

I wound the yarn too tightly on the niddy noddy, as well. That was fun, getting it all off. And my yarn is more woolen than I expected, but, hey, it's my first skein!!! The great part is that it is balanced, and not twisting up on itself anywhere. Yay me! Especially when you consider that my entire spinning experience, drop spindle included, is about 1 month.

the picture on the top is my skein before washing, my niddy noddy (which I now know is too small!) and my beloved "Hands On Spinning" by Lee Raven. The pic on the bottom is my yarn floating on top of the wash water. It has now been rinsed and is drying on a towel. I was surprised how dirty the water got when washing it! EEEEWWW!!!

I'll post pictures of the finished skein tomorrow once it's dry.

singles on the bobbin

I'm posting a picture of my spun singles on the bobbin today. I'm using a corriedale cross wool; a corriedale sheep crossed with some other sheep to produce a medium-weight, medium-length wool. It's quite easy to work with, and the color is a pretty natural brown.

It is called"combed top" which means it has been carded and then combed so that all the fibers are laying the same way, next to each other. When you buy the fiber it looks eerily like a long, thick human ponytail that has been hacked off and wound into a ball. Very smooth, straight, and even.

Okay, for those of you who have been asking how this works, here's an extremely oversimplified explanation: You pedal the treadles of the spinning wheel with your feet, causing the flyer of the wheel to twist the fiber you are holding in your hand. You control how much fiber is spun, and you control the amount of twist by the speed of your feet. The spun fiber is called a single and winds around the bobbin, shown here. The bobbin can be removed and another put in its place. You can then spin both bobbin-fulls of fiber (called plying) to produce a yarn.
I know that's a pretty simplified explanation, but I hope it gives you some idea of what I'm doing. There is a lot more involved in it than I have stated here, but you get the picture.

Edited to add:
In her usual style, my sister-in-law is interested in what my spinning can provide for her. She wants me to spin some cotton or silk, and crochet or knit her a bikini. *sigh* Anyone know of a good knit/crochet bikini pattern? :)

Hindsight

Well, as I lay in bed waiting for our house to cool off (which took until about 3 a.m.) I went over my performance in the 5K yesterday. I sucked. I was too tired. The no air conditioning thing has kept all of us from sleeping well for about a week. (We're a real cranky bunch right now. You should come visit, it's great.) Also my diet has been crap lately. I had been watching it very carefully, but about a month ago I fell off the wagon and just started eating whatever I wanted again. Bad move.

So, I'm listing a bummer diet and no sleep, in addition to not training hard enough, as the factors for my fussiness and overall crummy run yesterday. Crap. It's hard to keep a decent training schedule when I have kids' school activities, Drew has weird work hours, and it's 103 degrees outside! I guess I'll be hitting the treadmill at Anne's again.

I did, however, get a new spinning book in the mail yesterday. "Hands on spinning" by Lee Raven. I can't wait to try out her tips and techniques. :)

5K fun run

Well, I did it.
Mike Simpson tolerated me during the run, and was patient and helpful. THANKS MIKE!!! I'm a whiny runner, and he didn't even smack me once. My time was 31:49, I averaged a 10 minute 18 second mile. Not great, but I did it. I still have mental problems with running, as Mike knows now! I have trouble just pushing myself and giving it all. It was really cool seeing my kids waiting for me at the finish line and cheering "go mama go!" They thought I did great, which was the best part.
Note how relaxed Mike looks in the action shot above. I, however, am having hallucinations featuring double bacon cheeseburgers and animal style In N Out french fries.

Too Hot

Our air conditioner is broken, of course. It was 100 degrees yesterday, and inside my house it was over 90 degrees. None of us are sleeping very well. It was too hot to use the spinning wheel last night--I couldn't face draping myself in wool (I am my own distaff) and spinning under a fan is a disaster waiting to happen.

I have been contacted by Meridian Jacobs about some spinning classes at her farm next month! Yay! You can check out her beautiful projects and those amazing Jacob sheep at www.meridianjacobs.com

My race is tomorrow, which promises to be as hot as yesterday and today. It's at 9 a.m. so hopefully it won't be too dreadful by then. Cross your fingers!! Pray for me!!

The Machine

This is my new Kromski Sonata spinning wheel!! I got it for Mother's Day. We drove up to Placerville so I could just look at the wheel, since I'd been researching forever, and Drew took the kids to the farmer's market so I could take my time. The girls came back into the shop and said, "Daddy says it's Mother's Day so you can do whatever you want." So I did.

The Kromski wheels are all very beautiful, very old-world looking. They are hand made by a family in Poland. This Sonata is their newest model. After much adjusting of pins and knobs and bands, I have found the sweet spot, and am working on spinning merino from the fold, deciding that I am basically allergic to that soft bu terribly slippery Angora rabbit fiber, and LOVING the wool from Jacob sheep. Especially the carded and then pin-drafted sliver (pronounced sly-ver) of the Jacob wool, prepared by Robin Lynde from Meridian Jacobs farm in Vacaville. I have also spun some fiber from a corriedale cross, but it is combed top and harder to work with, also is easier to spin from the fold. In addition, my friend Denise Raasch bought some romney/llama blend fiber from Heron View farms at the Conference of Northern CA Handweavers (which was a really fun time!) and I spun a little of it. Now I wish I had bought some, too!!
Spinning from the fold, simplified: http://www.graftonfibers.com/fold.htm

In other news, my 5K race is on Saturday--two days away! Yikes! I am tired, menstrual, and Evan has not been sleeping well. I may have to either take away naps altogether, or shorten them by about half. He has been up until 10 and waking up at 5. Yuck.
And, thanks to Mike Simpson for volunteering to run with me, while Drew watches the kids. :)

Anne's comments on my blog

It has been pointed out by my sister-in-law, in a none too subtle way, that my blog (and possibly myself as well) is boring and dorky. She also notes the lack of mention of herself, and the credit for getting me started running.

Here goes:
Anne' got me started running, by running herself and getting enviably thin. She has since abandoned me in favor of exercise of the two-wheeled variety, and her children's burgeoning sports careers. Oh, and cleansing her colon. I intend to mention her once in a while, for comic relief if nothing else.

To further irritate her, I am including this picture of her graceful descent of a snow-covered hill somewhere near Blue Canyon. Who's dorky now?

running and spinning

I have been running since January. New Year's Resolution-type thing. Anyway, my first race is this Saturday. EEEEK!! Running to benefit the Roseville public elementary schools. Good cause, since my kids go to school, eh?

I have also become the proud owner of a Kromski Sonata spinning wheel. My Mother's Day gift. (Thanks Drew!!) I have named her "Patience."

As I progress, in my running and my spinning, I plan to post blogs and pics regarding both. Please be patient! As the title of my blog expresses, I have three kids and my only opportunity for most of these activities is nap time and school time.

Have a great day!

my first blog

Hello! Welcome to my blog, 3kids0time. Obviously, it stands for "three kids, no time." How true!

I plan to keep you all informed of my running progress, my instruction and practice on the spinning wheel and drop spindle, and our family travels.

Enjoy!