Today is the first day of the retreat sessions. For the first three days of SOAR, we took a 3-day long class. For the next two days, we take two 3-hour classes per day. I got into:

Friday:
New Age Fibers for Spinners with Patsy Sue Zawistoski
Color and Plying with Deb Menz

Saturday:
Creating Silk Blends with Judith MacKenzie McCuin
Maximizing Spindle Productivity with Abby Franquemont

New Age Fibers for Spinners with Patsy Sue Zawistoski
Patsy passed around all kinds of crazy new fibres, all the way from the original manufactured fibre, rayon, to the more recent fibres like Optim (stretched merino) and silk latte (which contains NO SILK). Basically what we learned is “buyer beware” since, for example, SWTC markets soy rayon as “100% Soy Silk ™” even though it’s only actually about 50% soy rayon! The remainder is made up of “high quality polymers and monomers”. And carbonized bamboo actually contains only 8-10% bamboo (actually, carbonized bamboo) and the rest is the aforementioned polymers and monomers.

We got to sample little goody bags of fibres. Cosy and I split our samples so we could have twice as many:

You can see the little samples I spun on my (new) spindle wound around all those bits and bobs of fibre. I got merino/tencel, soysilk/cashmere, bamboo rayon, cotton/recycled pop bottles, and soysilk/wool. It was a great class and I feel ready to go out into the wilds of the internet and buy all kinds of new fibres to play with now.

Color and Plying with Deb Menz
Deb is the fibre world’s colour maven.

She dyed 80 or more 5oz bundles of fibre for us to spin for our homework, and then all those bits of fibre behind her on the table (we used 5 each, so >400 of them?). She figures that took her 3 weeks.

In this class we spun a single out of the 5oz blob and then plied it with the smaller blobs (which we spun in class) based on the color wheel. Deb made us ply tight, so don’t be critical of my plying job on some of these, ok?

My single:

Plied with analogous (neighbors on the colour wheel, so blue):

Plied with a cool colour (acid green) because my single is warm:

Plied with a yarn that had one colour in common (hot pink):

Plied with a high contrast colour (dark or light, I chose dark):

Plied with a random colour that Deb threw at us (I got dark green):

And all together:

Pretty awesome. I’m pumped about colours and plying now. It’s so much fun to be adventurous with colour since I have been kind of terrified of colours until now, especially doing crazy things with colours like this. Deb even buys two different spacedyed rovings and either drafts them together (crazy!) or plies them together. Or even three of them together. Or four of them together. THIS IS CRAZY TALK.

Today is a rest day, if “rest” includes “maniacal shopping”. There’s a market in the ballroom today and a bunch of vendors are here to sell us their fibres, spinning wheels, spindles, looms, and other delicious stuff. I kind of blew my budget on a bunch of stuff and there’s more I want to buy - but from a Canadian vendor, so I’m just going to give her a call when I get back to Canada, now that I have fondled her goods. In a non-dirty way.

Here’s part of what I bought:

Clockwise from the top left corner:
1lb Finn top
1lb baby Alpaca roving (naturally silvery white)
2 blended rovings (cashmere, merino, alpaca) from Lamb’s something something
2 batts from the redhead (blends)
2 red silk rovings from the redhead
1lb blended roving from Carolina Handspun (the limited edition SOAR colorway)

I just couldn’t resist this:

I also somehow ended up with 3 <1oz spindles (I really only needed one), a Tibetan support spindle, and 4ish pounds of Polworth fleece to spin from the locks. How am I going to get this all home?!

But! On the bright side, the Louet guys are here and they are going to fix/upgrade my Victoria for free on Saturday. This is why it’s good to come to these things - they have made 3 significant modifications to the wheel since I bought mine and they are going to give me two of them (I don’t really need the third; my wheel doesn’t do the thing it’s designed to fix). So no longer is my footman going to blow off the drive wheel when I’m plying, and no longer will my brake tensioning knob fall out and get tangled in everything all the time. And they’re going to give me a new spring - we’ll see if I can go back to liking having a spring on the brakeline!

We also walked back out to the waterfall again. I wasn’t in a picturey mood, and the light was strange, so I only took one photo:

Meghan spinning at the waterfall:

Some people went skinny-dipping. I did not. No pictures!

One of the retreat sessions I signed up for requires me to spin 5oz of merino by tomorrow, so I’m off to get that done. Hopefully I get to bed before 3am.

We finished up our spinning class today and got prepared for the gallery (all the classes show off what they’ve spent the last 3 days learning and you can wander around and check out what you would like to learn next year). We decided that we had made skein hats:

(image courtesy ToadyJoe)

Bad myspace picture:

The total production of 18 novice spinners (the poofy ones are Cosy’s):

The other kind of skein hat (tm me), modeled by Danny from Toronto:

Ingrid shows us how to comb, swedish style (aka no-nonsense style):

Some of the other classes’ yarn and weaving and such:

When Abby teaches you to spin, you’re not allowed to mess with your longdraw:

Nilda and Aquilina doing some backstrap weaving:

Today in class we covered longwools, cabled yarns, and Navajo plying. It doesn’t feel like it, but I’m learning tons and tons. I have about 20 sample skeins so far, all nicely tagged and documented, and lots of notes. The class quickly degenerates into playing around - Rudy gives us fibre, and we mess around spinning it using all these new wonderful techniques that we have just learned.

Class:

Then Amy, Cosy, Meghan and I went for a walk to try to find a waterfall. We asked for directions at the front desk and they very carefully explained to us that the trail to the waterfall was really, really wet and we needed good boots to get in. We decided to brave it anyways, figuring that we could turn back if it got really muddy. The front desk clerk then gave us really terrible directions because she assumed we were going to drive most of the way to the waterfall (mental note, clarify in the future), so we ended up walking there the roundabout way on a one-way road. The trail was not at all muddy - in fact, Amy walked the whole way there and back in slippers (because she is crazy!).

The fall colors are ridiculously beautiful when the sun is going down. I couldn’t stop taking pictures of the sun shining through leaves. The leaves here turn RED - it’s ridiculous. Of course none of my red leaf photos turned out, but I will try again on Thursday when we go back out to the waterfall.

Maple:

Caduceus:

The girls:

The waterfall was in a shooting range. A shooting range full of deer. Good thing I was wearing “don’t shoot me orange” (see previous photo):

Found it:

And we get to go back on Thursday! I will take better pictures when there is more light, I promise.

Harper’s Index:
3: Wacky dreams I had before realizing that falling asleep listening to Portishead on my ipod was a really bad idea.
8: Hours of sleep last night (including wacky dreams).
8: Hours of spinning today (we’re forbidden from spinning in the evenings as per Rudy).
21: Cumulative spinning hours this week.
2: Hours spent hiking (joy!).

Today was day 1 of “Spinning 201″ classes with Rudy Amman. I diidn’t know how much I would get out of it (because I am so awesome), but Rudy blew my mind about 10 times in the first three hours. I have taken pages and pages of notes and my brain is SO FULL.

The man:

The classroom:

The hotel:

Random scenery:

Cosy winding off:

Random happy dog who made my day:

Cosy, Amy, Meghan and I went for a whomp through the woods and found:

A ski:

A haunted building in front of which Meghan and Cosy took a picture:

A rusty old ski lift:

Fall colors:

Rusty stuff:

More rusty stuff:

And fall colors:

My day, Harper’s Index style:
8: Hours of spinning today.
8: Skeins produced.
1: Bottles of wine consumed.
16: Rows of knitting ripped out.

Songs stuck in my head today:
Mad World - Gary Jules ;)

Gotta go, some woman on the next couch over is talking to her husband on skype - WITHOUT HEADPHONES!

Arrival day!

I survived the epic 6 hour O’Hare layover! Time goes by quickly when there’s internet to be had.

How on earth did I end up booking flights on the World’s Smallest Aircraft for both my flight to Chicago and my flight to Allentown? I know I’m flying for free, Air Canada, but seriously.

9 hours of sleep felt really good. I even managed to fall asleep early despite my room’s backing onto the hotel pool. Who lets their hotel pool stay open ’til midnight on a Saturday night?! Four Points Sheraton, apparently. It was party central.

Thoughts on Pennsylvania so far: It’s beautiful, but it smells like cigarette smoke. Everyone here smokes, and they all do it RIGHT outside the buildings. And you can buy a 2-bdrm house in Allentown for $19,900. Nice!

I’m waiting for the limo driver to show up to take me up into the mountains. When I was booking this limo, I asked the guy which terminal building he was in. He replied “THE terminal building” and now I see what he meant:

On the left there you can see Big Blue, my constant travelling companion. Someone ripped Big Blue’s strap a few trips ago - I’m going to have to find a certified naugahyde repairperson to get that fixed. I hope they can match the color. I’m unreasonably attached to ol’ Big Blue. Only once has anyone else had the same suitcase as me at the baggage claim and we had a huge conversation about where she’d gotten her bag (handed down from her parents, same as me). It will be a sad day when Big Blue needs to be replaced.

(after a limo ride)

There is nothing better than walking into a hotel, seeing a bunch of knitters/spinners sitting in the lobby, walking up and introducing myself as Dana, and getting invited to sit down (to the point of someone even getting up to get me a chair). Instant friends!

Mah peeps (a small sampling thereof; there are 250 people at the conference):

Songs stuck in my head:
Allentown - Billy Joel (how could I not? “And I’m livin’ here in Allentown, and they’re closin’ all the factories down”)

Joining the legion of bloggers who will be liveblogging SOAR, may I present the intrepid dana:

(I like how the background there makes me look like I am from the future. Trust me when I say that O’Hare is not much like the future.)

Vital stats, Harper’s Index style:
30: Minutes of sleep last night.
2: Hours of sleep on the plane this morning.
2: Hours I got to spend listening to random guy on the airplane trying to pick up the girl seated next to him.
1: Phone numbers of girls gotten by random airplane guy (you go, dude).
5: Pounds of fibre in my luggage (approx).
1: Spinning wheels in my luggage.
$6.95: Cost of 24 hours of wireless internet in O’Hare.
0: Hours of spinning done to date.
4: Hours left in O’Hare layover.
Many: Normals weirded out by me taking pictures of myself in the airport.

Songs I have stuck in my head:
Going to Chicago - Joe Williams
Portishead - Sour Times
JT - Senorita (why?)

Stay tuned for more exciting news!

My flight to SOAR got changed. I have a 6 hour layover in Chicago now. I was just sitting here thinking “I wonder how much knitting I can pack with me since I’ll have one carry-on taken up with my spinning wheel”.. then I realized - I can spin in the airport for 6 hours! This is going to be great!

For some reason I’ve spun a lot of worsted in the last year but I haven’t thought to spin any woolen. After reading on ravelry about how quickly people can spin when they spin long draw, I decided to give it a shot. I made some crappy sophomoric rolags from some top (I didn’t have cards yesterday) and spun this out of some Hello Yarn corriedale:

Then I went to Karen’s and borrowed Morgan’s hand cards and spent yesterday afternoon making rolags out of a bunch of stuff.

The rest of the green corriedale:

A whack (10oz) of Lorna’s Laces top, which in my experience is really felted up and hard to spin unless you card it. When I spun my first one of her tops, I really wished I had some cards so I wouldn’t have to do so much prep. This fibre is NOT in my good books.

Before:

After (this is a sampling; I have a whole plastic shopping bag stuffed full of rolags. 10oz is a lot.):

And now I’m having a go at spinning the green rolags up. Let me tell you, people say that prep is important when you’re spinning woolen and they aren’t lying. This is a hell of a lot easier with actual rolags and I can tell which rolags I made first and which I made after I’d gotten a bit better at carding.

Some other things I have been working on:

This is a new sock yarn and colorway that we’re thinking of offering through kfb. The yarn is a merino/tencel blend and it’s really soft and shiny. The stripes are blue/green/purple and although self-striping yarns are really labor-intensive to dye, the effect is worth it! What do you think?