Dyed in the Wool Handmade

Last night my sister and my friends came over to drink some wine and help celebrate my birthday. I got an adorable sheepy card from Nicci and Aaron and Natalie brought me a bottle of wine. Jeremy got me an awesome cake, chocolate with chocolate and white chocolate truffle filling. I made the mistake of looking at the nutritional information that came on the cake and it clearly stated that no less than 25% was pure fat. Now that’s a cake!

I would have pulled out the tripod to try to get a good, low-light shot of the whole thing, but the rate at which those candles were burning and dripping made it impossible. I loved the candles!

Jeremy also gave me Some Kind of Wonderful on dvd. I used to have this movie on tape (I taped it off the tv) and watched it practically every day. I can’t even remember the last time I saw it, so I’m really excited to watch (and recite) it tonight. Interesting story: When I was in grade seven my class went on a field trip to the Chum City Building down on Queen W. and got a tour of the building as well as watched them tape Toronto Rocks. That day they happened to have Flesh for Lulu in the studio. At this point I hadn’t seen the movie yet and didn’t realize that I should have been really freaking excited. But I got my mug on tv for a few seconds while they panned across my class and we all cheered and waved.

Anyway, my actual birthday is on Tuesday and I will be 33.

Here are a couple of batts I made recently. These contain corriedale and icicle (nylon – the sparkly stuff). The grey corriedale is commercially dyed, but I dyed the green stuff and the icicle myself. The photo below shows the batts after I stripped and pulled them into roving. Most of the time when I spin from batts I don’t bother to pull them out, instead I spin woollen from chunks I rip off. This time I spun a semi-worsted yarn, from woollen prep and a mixed woollen/worsted technique. The yarn is finished but I haven’t got a photo of it yet.

I’m dyeing up a lot of yarn and fibre for the Frolic, and the thing that’s slowing me down is the fact that I have no place to dry it all! I have to work every day in relatively small batches. I’ve got stuff drying in my office and in the laundry room, and as soon as something is almost dry, I start a new batch.

I’ve got new yarns to offer, starting with the Frolic. One is a superwash laceweight yarn that I’ll be selling in large 4oz., 980 yard skeins. Two skeins will make a huge shawl. This yarn is a very soft and lofty 2-ply. I’ve also got a gorgeous 3-ply fingering bamboo blend; 70% superwash merino, 20% bamboo, 10% nylon. It makes a beautiful and strong sock yarn, but it’s also great for shawls and pretty much anything else. The bamboo gives it a nice sheen and makes it incredibly soft.

I’m also dyeing up a bunch of fibre, and hopefully I’ll get enough dyed up so that I can update my shop next week! I’ve got lots of nice superwash merino, as well as some regular merino.

I have a .ca domain name registered with netfirms.com. I don’t use this domain. I just got an email stating it’s up for automatic renewal so I logged into my account to figure out how to disable that so I don’t forget and get charged $10.45. I spent a good half-hour searching my control panel and Netfirms’ knowledge base and there is no hint as to how one might do that. Lots of info on how to renew and how to buy more domains and how to give them more of your money, though. Plenty of that.

So I submitted a support ticket. I’m really annoyed that I have to do that in order to cancel my account, and that it’s not an obvious course of action. The reply I got informed me that in order to cancel I had to tell them why as well as either give them my account PASSWORD, provide a copy of my welcome letter or tell them the name of my favourite pet. Considering my account has my credit card number in it, I don’t want to send my password to them in email, or at all! I don’t have my welcome letter anymore, because I formatted my computer and lost it. I cannot remember which of my cats’ names I gave for the security question. So I decided to just go in my account and remove my credit card number. Guess what? CAN’T DO THAT.

So now what? I’m waiting to hear back from them. Why can’t I just cancel my domain from within my account? Am I going to have to cancel my credit card over this?

This is the latest Spunky Club fibre. South African Fine. This is 4 ounces; the other 4 just needs to be plied. I’m not keen on these colours for myself so this yarn will be for sale, probably at the Frolic. It’s very soft! It would make a great scarf or something like that.