Okay, but now it’s two days later, and I’m exHOSSted from being at work my whole life, minus the seven minutes I wasted in sleep at home, and I can’t be expected to recap thoroughly. But I’ll try.
Met Janine at her house in Berkeley. There are not enough superlatives to describe Janine. She’s just one of those people that you love immediately, upon the first meeting, and you want to grab her and hold onto her and make her teach you how to spin. Or that might be just me with that last part. But she’s awesome, truly. Ryan and I are tugging war with her. (Happy birthday, TMK!)
Then we picked up fancy la-di-dah lunch fixings (I had to make it up to them for doing the big bail last week on them) at Andronico’s, and crossed the Richmond Bridge over to Marin.
Sylvia lives in the most amazing spot in Marin, people, and this is her view.
Oh, and this:
Isn’t that amazing? It reminds me at once of the Wellington Bay in New Zealand, and the hills of the Cinque Terre. Lucky lady.
Sylvia IS a spin-goddess. She’s also known as Beadlizard, for her insane beading abilities (those little animals could almost talk, I swear), but we went to see her spin. Nowadays she uses an electric spinning wheel that her ole-buddy-ole-pal Alden Amos made her, and you’ve never seen anything like it. I was using some good old green merino, and getting a nice semi-slubby DK-weight single. She got something that looked like a green hair, using the same stuff. I could hardly spin — I was just staring at her.
Oh! Here’s a shot of Sylvia and Janine in action.
Isn’t Sylvia’s spinning gorgeous? Oh, what? You can’t see it? Hmmmm. Perhaps the emperor had no clothes, you wonder?
No, here’s proof. This is my three-ply next to her three-ply. Keep in mind this is from the same wool. The same dang wool:
That fine thread? Is THREE-PLY! We bow, don’t we?
And she taught me how to Navajo ply! I kinda suck at it, but I’ll practice.
Woot! Spinning! And I did figger out my problem with the Vogue pattern (#9 in new one); I just had to use my brain instead of following the pattern word-for-word. Go figure.
All right. Brain-fried. No more for now….
(spinning) mwah!
I need a spinning guru to teach me Navajo plying! Although honestly yours looks good too, just bigger.
Unfortunately, most pattern problems only need a quick injection of brains to fix them. I do sometimes wonder who proofreads these things.
Navajo ply is tough… at least for me it is but it looks so darn nice that I feel I have to try it more and more (okay more and more meaning when I drag my wheel out once every six months)
Sylvia is my hero… that is the thinnest three ply I’ve ever seen.
That is a 100% beautiful view from Sylvia’s place. Wow.
BTW, what Sylvia spins is called froghair. Go ahead. Ask her.
If you hadn’t told me, I’d have thought that the thicker one was the way it was supposed to be. Goes to show how much I KNOW about spinning:)
Yeah, but Rachael, do you *knit* with thread, or DK? You, I mean, not just the generic knitter. It is fun to spin very fine, but it’s more important to spin what you want to knit. I knit both, so I spin both.
And the pattern? I only read the first half of each motif while charting it out, then mirrored it instead of reading the words. Didn’t run into a problem that way, and I’m so glad I’ll have a chart to work off of.
Rachael is a natural. Every beginner I’ve ever seen, including me years ago, overspins and makes dense corkscrew slub-o-rama rope. Rachael? Oh, she spins lovely thick-thin bulky with just the right amount of twist and her thick is not too fat and her thin is not too skinny…
Main reason I spun a bit of froghair for her was it made her laugh. Thread does have its uses. Rachael and I should collaborate and use my thread as a binder for her bulky singles!
My DD and I really enjoyed having Janine and Rachael over. We’ve been smiling ever since.