Has anyone else noticed how expensive healthy bread has gotten at the grocery store? Or how much like cardboard they taste? I’m not sure if quality is really deteriorating, or if I’ve just gotten so used to home baked bread that store bread suffers by comparison. My quest for a good sandwich loaf intensified recently. […]
Read more "Baking Day"It happens to everyone sometimes… This one wasn’t as epic as the sculpey I caught on fire yesterday, but it does rather resemble newborn poo. That is certainly disgusting, but it’s not the intimidating-entrails-on-a-pike kind of disgusting that goes along with chaos armies. You can see the disc that I am trying to match on […]
Read more "Failure!"09.22.11 My husband is prepping for another tournament, so of course it’s modeling crunch time. It’s kinda nice to have his craft project all over the dining room for a change. This will be a base for one of his sorcerers. Now to see if I can match the paint job from the platform that […]
Read more "Warhammer Madness"This is my current newest skill. I have to teach a class on how to do it, in less than a month. I think I have the basics mastered, but teaching it… That’s another thing. This is also part of my A&S 50 project. More about that later.
Read more "Netting"Well, I’ve changed the name of my blog. It seems that even “fiber” as a heading is too narrow for me. I’m beginning to suspect that I have a serious problem. No only do I have a craft addiction, (I’m not kidding about this. I’m absolutely miserable if I go more than a day without […]
Read more "New Name"Several months ago I bought a sample card from Paradise Fibers with a whole bunch of different wool and silk fibers. I wondered, after Kaleeb’s and my experiments with natural dyes (in which the commercial wool took up the dyes much more intensely than my hand-spun), whether the breed of sheep made a large difference […]
Read more "Onions!"Well, here I am back after a long break. Here is my first woolen spun yarn. It was spun from the Shetland fleece I bought some time ago. I thought it had been sitting too long and would no longer be workable, but I wanted to try out my new HE top load washer for […]
Read more "New Again"I’m having quite a bit of trouble with fiber preparation. I’m working on learning to comb wool for worsted spinning using a set of English combs and the kid mohair that my husband and friends conspired to get for me at Sheep-Con (that’s what my husband calls the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival) last year. […]
Read more "Fiber preparation"I had a bit of time sans kids and husband, so I knocked out quite a few colors. Same procedure as before, one small spoonful of dye powder to 4 cups of water and 1/4 cup of vinegar, 6 yard skeins, pulled every 5 minutes. The russet, emerald, and turquoise were opaque at the start […]
Read more "Dyeing for Color Part II"Ok, so after struggling with the very small dye powder weights and thinking that I was going to need to get and analytical scale to be able to do small dye lots… I found this wonderful site http://www.gfwsheep.com/rov.inst/rov.inst.html. There they suggest making up concentrated batches in gallon containers and diluting from there… Duh! Only one […]
Read more "Reinventing the Wheel"