A good day’s work

It’s been difficult to get any quality time in the fiber room of our studio of late.  Most of my time has been spent on computer or graphic related work, with little left over for anything else.  Today, however, Tom stayed home to do a season’s worth of yard work.  That left me with the ability to put in a full day in the fiber room.  The result:

These babies are all headed off to Amy next week.  From there, I have no doubt she will find them good homes.

Lately, once the carding is done, I have no time left to spend playing with fiber.  Today, however, I got to spend some serious quality time with this fellow:

I used the time to work on his right foot.  When he began, he was supposed to be much, much smaller than he is turning out to be – somewhere in the 6-7 foot tall range.  The fiber production had been shut down for nearly a year due to the demands of the needles and having to home school two of our boys (long, nasty story that is far from over.)  When I took inventory this spring, the fiber was just too dusty to turn into batts.   Although I knew that the dust would card out of the fiber, I knew what that fiber looked like prior to carding.  There was no way I could card any of it for resale.  And there was a lot of fiber.

That’s when I got the idea to make the dragon.  An old dress form serves as the base.  The entire dragon is filled with multiple colors of rovings, batts, pieces of this and that.  His interior looks, well, internal!  The photo below shows part of his tail/rear prior to covering.

Will he ever get completed?  Who knows.  I was on a roll this spring with him, but having been away from him for the past couple of months, the idea of completion seems rather daunting.

Slipping away

Slipping in a post before the end of the month.  Once Mario arrived, everything I had started prior came to a standstill, including the blog.  He is doing well, however.  The second day he was here, they were all goofing around and I warned him that at the moment he was a guest, but in a few weeks he would be just another kid.  Those few weeks have passed, and lo and behold, he has become just another kid around here.  The boys are all adjusting to having an older brother, and he seems to be enjoying having little brothers for the first time.

I did manage one small project.  With cool nights upon us, I began to search around for a slipper pattern to crochet.  All of the patterns I found, however, had heels that come to a point.  While my heel is narrow, it is not pointy.  And who wants a seam back there, anyway?  So I began to play around with heels again and have come up with one I rather like.  I’m going to set about doing some different variations this evening, but here’s the first one:

crocheted slipper with shaped heel

I’ve also done a bit of spinning on the spindle Tom made me last week.  He has just begun making spindles recently after a long hiatus while we got the needles in full swing.  He was having fun at the lathe the other day and made up this for me:

banksia pod Swan spindle

It’s been at least two years since he turned one of the banksia pods – and he did a beautiful job.   I love the organic look of it.

As for Tom, he had a good time at Stitches Midwest.  It gave him the opportunity to put faces to so many names he has heard over the years.  For those that didn’t see it, Helen’s blog has a great picture of Tom at Stitches Midwest.

Impatient hookers?

For the “I want it now, I need it now” crowd, we’ve added a space on our crochet hook page where Tom will post custom hooks available for immediate purchase.  The first hook featured is a hand carved twist in Alabaster, Size I, 5.5 mm.

That’s all for now.  Our exchange student arrives tomorrow.  I’ll be cleaning from dawn till dusk in the hope he is not frightened when he enters the house.   Wish us luck.

From the Eye Candy department

While we were blasting away, Tom was working away in the studio, crafting a new line of beautiful needles.  Darn Pretty Exotics (TM) perhaps?  Check out these babies:

Darn Pretty Exotic (TM) cocobolo needles

And new therapy too!

We’ve been through a year of school hell.  It’s a long, ugly story that I won’t go into here, but it coincided with a year of grief and frustration within our business as well.  It is bad enough to have a much larger company take your ideas.  It’s another thing all together when they take your identity, too.

Suffice it to say,  we’ve all needed ways to release the angst.  We have been going to the driving range this summer.  Innocent little golf balls became the heads of school officials or owners of the aforementioned company.  It is amazing how much a little transference can improve one’s swing.

Yesterday we found something that may top the driving range – the shooting range!  The boys had a grand time.  Even this anti-gun girl had to admit that blowing up that little plastic disk or nailing those round targets felt good.   Move over, Mama Glock!