Beautiful California Day!

Today was a text book beautiful day in Southern California.  It was warm and sunny with whispy clouds in the sky.  I went down to the Cultural Arts Center in Torrence this morning for the Southern California Weavers and Spinners Fiber Festival.  I am proud of the self control I was able to maintain considering all the super fiber stuff there was to behold.  I came home with a pound of super soft washed marino locks in beige and chocolate and 8 oz of blue-faced leister roving for dyeing.  It was nice to see a bunch of fiber friends from GLASG, especially a few that weren't at the last guild meeting.  I brought my camera, but as usual, I was too overwhelmed to take any pictures.

The evening gave way to a beautiful sunset...

View of downtown LA from my porch.

Vibrant sun yellow... fiber inspiration?

With a hint more pink...

Cute owl windchime from Little Tokyo.  I love owls!

Poppy pods... they're great for crafts!

I've still got a bunch more fiber photos in the archives.  I guess they'll have to wait until another day... 

Countdown to losing my mind... Don't worry, it's a good thing!

In ten days I will be leaving for my Vipassanna mediation retreat in North Fork, CA.   While I'm there I will experience ten, ten hour days of insight meditation, which in a nutshell means I will be letting go of all unnecessary thoughts and quieting my mind, and 24hr a day noble silence.  This will teach me to truly observe my actions and experiences without dwelling on the past and worrying about the future.   My hope is that this retreat will be a jump-start to a regular meditation practice and will help me to learn to control my emotions and see them for what they are.  I am working toward to eliminating negative impulses and increasing my capacity to react in a calm and positive way.  I am learning that my habitual busy-ness has wired an unwanted addiction to stress and though I have recently been attempting to find ways in my life to escape the things that cause the most stress, I have only made myself busier and more stressed.  I need to create healthy calm habits to reduce stress and increase by ability to see things clearly and calmly in the moment.

I'm really excited about this whole endeavor and the potential positive effects it will have on my life.  In preparation for my retreat I purchased some meditation supplies.  Possibly a little overkill, but I think I'll be really comfy.  Follow these links to check out my new meditation cushion, zabuton sitting mat, and fleece, hooded robe.  At some point later I'll have Omar take some photos of me for the blog so you can see them in action!

I've been practicing with my new cushions and really enjoying them.  The hooded robe is helpful to eliminate distractions.  Earplugs also help ;-)  My biggest challenge is the upper back and neck pain I've been experiencing the last few weeks.  I'm going to visit my chiropractor, Ty, on Wednesday, so hopefully that will help.  I'm also hoping he can suggest a new pillow situation.  I've tried a whole bunch of different ones including a memory foam pillow and haven't found a good solution.  Pretty soon I may break down and try the $100 tempur-pedic pillow.  But I'm going to wait to see what Ty say.  You can't put a  price on being pain free and having a good nights sleep.

Playing catch-up...

I've been home sick for the last couple of days so I've had the chance to catch-up on some personal stuff (like 13 loads of laundry with Omar on Friday) and get a bunch of work done on fiber projects that need attention before the end of the year.  I also photoshopped a bunch of photos for the blog, so depending on how much time it takes, I'm going to try and get a bunch of FO's and UFO's up on the blog for your amusement.

 My greatest accomlishment of the weekend was to finish spinning and plying all the fiber for my friend AJ's toddler sweater project.  I started with 24 oz. of "Love Me Tender" superwash merino fiber from Crown Mountain Farms. I tore it into long strips and spun up six bobbins of approx 4 oz each.  I then plied them into three skeins of 2ply yarn at a grand total of 744 yards.  I have a feeling it will be plenty for a sweater or two!  In the photo below you can see some unspun fiber, spun singles and a test swatch that AJ knitted up.

Roving, Bobbins & Swatch 
I originally gave her a choice of a two or a three ply and she liked the two ply better because the colors were more speckled.   The three ply looked much more tweedy.  I will post a photo of the finished yarn after I wash and set the twist.  I didn't have a chance to get a good photo in the natural sunlight today.

While I was spinning this yarn I was watching the Quantum edition of What the Bleep Do We Know.  If you haven't seen this movie, you must!  It's about quantum physics and how it and the power of the mind effect how we perceive, or don't perceive, reality.  The feature version is probably around twoish hours.  The Quantum version available on the three disc DVD is over 5 1/2 fascinating hours!  When it was over, I wanted to watch it again...  I may wait for my next big yarn commission ;-)  So many amazing revelations... Check out the movie and let me know what you think!

Tomorrow is Summer's first day at HMI.  She is going to be the new Program Administrator.  I really excited to have her as part of the family.   Not only is she a talented arts admin type person, she is also crafty!  She's a knitter and likes to make photo scrapbooks.  I made this skein of hand dyed merino/tencel yarn for her as a welcome gift.

Yarn for Summer! Yeah!!

 Another project I'm currently pondering is my feather and fan rainbow lace scarf.  I purchased this yarn from Sue Grougan's Esty shop.  She makes really nice rainbows.  This was my first experiment with lace and I love it.  The challenge was to figure out how many repeats to make in order to have a scarf that isn't too long or too short.  I think I ended up starting it with not enough repeats, resulting in possibly a too long scarf.  I've decide to rip it out and start over.  I think I'm going to add two more repeats that way it will end up being much wider and hopefully just the right length.  BTW, check out the felted bowl I made many months ago (shown in the second photo) that I discovered makes a great center pull ball holder/protector!

Too early to tell... 
So pretty, but going to be way too long. Time to rip out... I'm scared!

 Here's another Sue Grougan rainbow.  I saw this fiber/yarn on her website To Knit, Perchance to Dream and asked her to send me some rovings so I could try it myself!  This was an instant gratification project compared to most I've been working on lately.  It spun up fast to a 282 yard, 2ply and looked super cool when finished.  Not nearly as perfect as Sue's sock yarn, but it certainly shows promise!  I'm still figuring out how to spin tightly enough to get the ply to grip together, but no so tightly that it looks like two pieces of rope wound together.  (I love it when the fiber just poofs together like magic.)  This particular skein falls somewhere in the middle I think...

Look at the pretty rainbow!! 

Can you stand it???

Dartmoor Greyface are quite possibly the cutest sheep in the universe!!!!

Variety is the spice of life...

I'm working on a whole bunch of different stuff this weekend.  Last night I cleaned the filter of my fishtank.  I had a few casualties this week, tought to tell if it's due to age, stress, or a dirty tank.  More than likely a combination of all.  I lost one of my amano shrimp. and one of the silver tip tetras.  Also, I seem to be missing a rummy nose tetra, though his body is MIA.  The amano shrimp have never been truly happy in the big tank.  They've been super freaked out by all the other fish since they have lived most of their lives in a mostly solitary situation.  So, the stronger/more confident of the two remains.  The silver tip tetras are constantly stressing each other and everyone else in the tank out.  I think this poor littly guy just died of fatigue.  In a way, i think the fewer of those guys the better, since all they seem to do is bugger each other anyway.  The rummy nose is just a mystery.  Everyone else seems to be doing fantastically.  they are constantly hungry and always digging about for food.  the flying foxes are huge, probably about 5-6 inches each.  The turquiose rainbow is darkening and continues to grow.  The Iranian rainbow is looking a bit skinny and probably needs to eat more.  (I'm going to go out for more bloodworms tomorrow.)  The clown loaches are thriving.  The five cory cats are doing great too!

This evening I'm off to play Don Giovanni with Opera Pasadena.  It's nice to be out playing oboe, but the sad part is that my mentor, Bert Lucarelli, is playing a Bach recital tonight in Pacific Palasades and I can't attend.  I did get to visit with Bert this afternoon over a cup of coffee which was such a treat.  He is such a wonderful person... he's one of the things I miss the most about the east coast.  The nice thing is that because I travel to NYC for business a few times a year, I get to see him more than I might otherwise.   Check out his CD "Bach by Bert" on Crystal Records, the listing is about half-way down the page.  There are also some sound samples you can listen to.  It's fantastic!