Have suitcase, will travel

I bought a new suitcase recently. It's a sophisticated shade of purple. My old suitcase was flimsy and kind of beat up; this one's much nicer and it's got four wheels instead of two, so I guess if I ever miss my ride I can just sit on my suitcase and scoot to my destination.

Then I rediscovered Etsy, which I'd bought stuff from before but never really browsed. On Etsy I discovered and bought (among other things) a leather passport cover with a design of trees stamped on it, a customized leather luggage tag (with my name and email on it!), and a lingerie bag made of gorgeous blue and purple cloth.

I am so ready to go somewhere.

I get this urge to travel every few years. This year at least I have two trips planned, one in April (my brother's family has rented a beach house for the week and has invited me and Mom to join them) and DragonCon in September. But I want to go somewhere now, somewhere exciting and wonderful. Maybe that's why I've suddenly set aside Bloodhound to work on Adventures in Zoology.

Incidentally, to pay for my Etsy stuff I've started my own Etsy shop. I sell handspun yarn! And stuff I've made from handspun yarn! I've already sold a few things (enough to pay for an inexpensive silver ring I just ordered) and I'm happy to be clearing out some old yarn and working on new yarn. Maybe I can make enough money to take a trip somewhere, like a voyage on the Orient Express.

The manly dog scarf

Here it is, the very short scarf I made for my uncle out of the fluffy puppy fur he saved from his dog Jack. If I'd started this project before December, I could have spun up a bunch more of the fur into yarn and made him a decently long scarf. Don't tell him I slacked off. I'll just quietly let him believe I used up all the fur.

Anyway, the scarf is actually a good length for him to put around his neck and button the ends under his coat. That's what I tell myself, anyway. It's very soft and warm, and I used the same pattern I used last year for the neighbor whose scarf I made out of his dog's fur. I feel so typecast. The result is an attractive, manly scarf that was really, really super easy to knit. I didn't do any kind of edging because I didn't want it to look too frou-frou and anyway I ran out of yarn.

Here's the pattern, for those of you who might be interested. I used size 10 needles and I guess the yarn is around worsted weight. I rarely bother to check the gauge on my handspun unless I'm making something that absolutely requires it.

Manly Scarf

CO 20 sts
2 rows seed st
K P K, K2 P2 across, K P K
K P K, P2 K2 across, K P K
K P K, P2 K2 across, K P K
K P K, K2 P2 across, K P K
rep until almost out of yarn
2 rows seed st
cast off

Sit n' Spin

I actually sat down with my spinning wheel tonight, for the first time since early spring. I usually only spin during the winter. When it's warm out, I don't want to sit still for several hours with a lapful of wool.

I finished up a bobbin of gorgeous hand-dyed bamboo silk that I should have finished months and months ago, and which I'm planning to knit into something for myself eventually. I still have another 8-oz skein to spin up, though, and it's slippery. I switched to spinning more Jack fluff--Jack being my uncle's dog, and the fluff being his shed puppy undercoat that I asked my uncle to save several years ago. Last year I spun a bunch of it up for him, but he decided he wanted something made of it so I need to finish the spinning and make him something--probably a scarf which will be 10 million percent too hot for him ever to wear. I have a kerchief I made from my old dog Jasper's fur (Jasper was a Newfoundland with beautiful soft black fur) plied with purple mohair, and even though it's filet crocheted and therefore not very dense, it's still too warm to wear.

And you thought I was boring when I talked about writing!

I watched the new Karate Kid movie while I spun (you know, the one that was titled Kung Fu Kid everywhere except in America, home of the stupid). That's a sweet movie. Tomorrow Mom said I should spin some more while we watch The Forbidden Kingdom with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. Then Monday we can watch Kung Fu Panda while I spin. My uncle's scarf will be made with love and kung fu movies.

I am covered in puppy fur.

Plying love

I realized today that I've spun nothing but dog hair this year. Not that I've done much spinning at all; in addition to the neighbor's dog hair I've only spun up my uncle's Golden retriever's fluff that he saved from when the dog was a puppy.

Next year I'm going to spin a lot more than I did this year. It takes a long time, but I do love the result. This evening I plied some of the neighbor's dog hair that I've been spinning. It was awful to spin--really short staple, full of guard hairs and VM*, and coarse and ugly. But once I had it plied and wound off onto the niddy-noddy, I wanted to hug it. I love the way newly-plied yarn looks. And after I washed the yarn in four changes of warm water, the first two with generous dollops of (expensive and hard to acquire here) Kookaburra Woolwash, it looked even better and smelled much better too.

While I was tearing the house up today looking for my ballwinder, I found a lot of wonderful fiber I forgot I had--silk and mohair, wool and cashmere. I can't wait to get started spinning it.

Um, this post had nothing to do with writing. So I'll just mention that I have been working intermittently today on Bell-Men and it's at 118,500 words. I'll be cutting probably 8,500 words after I've finished the rewrite, but it's still going to end up way long. I'm not sure if that's good or not.

*VM=vegetative matter, in this case mostly burrs

One last post for 2008!

Happy new year, everybody! I got a haircut today, which is about all the celebrating I can stand.

Also I built a fire in the fireplace and sat by it and spun up the last of some ugly teal wool I've been putting off finishing since, like, May, and plied it too, and watched Kung Fu Panda (again--it's my favorite movie of 2008) with my mom. And ate pizza and popcorn. Also we made smores, since where there's fire, there should be smores. I'm going on a diet starting in about 50 minutes, so no smores in 2009.

I didn't get any writing done today, but my newest nightgown, which is currently my favorite, smells faintly of woodsmoke. It's a tradeoff.

I hope everyone has a fantastic 2009!

Homespun

I keep reading books where people (usually women, pertaining to their skirts) are wearing "homespun."

Dear Fantasy Authors:

Before the industrial revolution, everyone wore homespun. Even queens. Who often did plenty of spinning themselves, actually, because all women were expected to spin.

Sincerely,
yeah yeah whatever

This is an example of writers parroting what they've seen in other books, without understanding the significance of the word. Not only that, but as a spinner myself (for a decade now), I resent the implication that homespun goods are inferior to mill-spun. Come over to my house and I'll let you drool over the wool and thread I've spun. And I'm not even all that good a spinner, certainly not a professional.

More on this in a week, I'm sure, when Trunk Novels releases Weaver's Shroud, because it's all about spinning. Well, spinning is involved. So are ghosts and necromancers and gods. But the spinning is pretty darn interesting.

Weirdest thing I ever washed

I did a load of laundry this morning, and when I went to get them out--I found my plastic bottle of spinning wheel oil mixed in with the sheets. It must have fallen off the linen closet shelf into the dirty clothes basket. And my washer is also a dryer, one of those tiny apartment models that take forever to work and get VERY HOT. I picked up the oil bottle with a washcloth, figuring it would be half-melted at least.

But no, it's fine. So is the oil. The cap didn't come off or anything. My gawd, I am one lucky person. For one thing, now I don't have to buy more spinning wheel oil. Or sheets.

It's Thursday so I had the day off, and as usual I wasted it entirely. I think I've written maybe 250 words all day. I need my day job for more than one reason, obviously.

Kate ventures out into the big wide world

For the first time since I moved back to Tennessee, I had a social engagement today. I went to my old handspinning guild, the Tennessee Valley Handspinners, with my spinning wheel (a mahogany-finished Kromski Symphony, which I lerrrv). I had missed the group so much, but I was worried they'd all forgotten me. Not so!

I paid my $10 yearly dues and bought 4 oz of handdyed (turquoise) wool roving from Barb for $6, which pretty much wiped me out for the day. While I spun up about half the roving, I talked to my old friends Lori and Charlotte and Nancy and Sue and to new members I hadn't yet met.

I remember at one point I was concentrating on my spinning and listening to the talk around the room. To my right Nancy and Patty were discussing Nancy's recent knitting cruise--and neither of them found it odd that when talking about the cruise, there was no mention of swimming or scenery or luxurious spa-type stuff or food; instead, Nancy was telling Patty about a fiendishly difficult skirt pattern they all tried to master while on ship. And to my left, Lori and Carmen were talking about learning to play the harp (handspinners are a clever and talented lot). I heard Barb talking about her sheep nearby, and someone else talking about the Samoyed puppy she was getting. Everywhere I looked, people were busy with their hands: knitting, crocheting, spinning on drop spindles, and of course spinning on wheels, which turned deceptively slowly as the spinners treadled, but if you looked at the bobbins they were flying along. And I thought, damn, why did I ever leave this?

I'm glad to be home in East Tennessee. There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

Rats. Also, Terry Pratchett spins!

Well, I got a rejection from the editor who requested the full ms. a few weeks ago. On the other hand, she gave me a good critique and said many very nice things about the manuscript. So I'm disappointed, but also hopeful.

Yesterday I drove five hours to see Terry Pratchett. He gave a great talk--interesting and funny--and had an extended question-and-answer session afterwards. If you ever get the chance to see him (and you should try), he seems a little tired of answering questions about how he writes.

One of the questions he answered was why Tiffany Aching's family raises sheep but no one seems to spin. During the course of answering the question, he mentioned that he spins and has two spinning wheels. Wow! Hey, I spin too! That's too awesome for words. One of my favorite authors shares one of my favorite hobbies as well.

He said he has a fourth Tiffany Aching book planned but that after that the character will probably be too old for the children's Discworld books; he also said that he doesn't have any plans to include her in the other Discworld books. He also said he's planning a third book with Moist von Lipwig. Someone asked him if Vetinari is possibly grooming Moist as a successor, but Pratchett said no, that "Moist can be the shepherd, but he can't be the butcher." And that seemed to be an off the cuff remark, not something he'd worked up ahead of time. Currently he's working on a non-Discworld book about some people on an island, but he didn't say much about it.

He talked a lot about the filming of the Hogfather and other of his books that had been/were being filmed. He mentioned that Sean Astin plays Twoflower and does a great job, and also said that Astin is himself a Discworld fan. Apparently Pratchett was doing a signing in London or someplace and Astin showed up in line, at which point Pratchett said, "Hey, I know you--you were in Harry Potter!" That got a good laugh.

There were about 200 people who wanted books signed. Considering that Pratchett had a cold and was losing his voice, he was remarkably good about talking to people. I tried to think of something non-fangirlish but witty to say to him, but by the time I got my books signed (some three hours after he started his talk), he was really flagging so I didn't really say anything at all. At that point he seemed to be at the wretched point of a cold where you no longer care where you put the used kleenexes, so he was surrounded by crumpled pink tissues, like flowers. Poor guy. He seems really nice and obviously likes his fans. I think today was his last stop on his book tour and he gets to go home, so I hope he gets better soon.

I'm currently reading (carefully) a copy of Making Money that has the author's fingerprints on it. And probably also his cold germs.