Fiber in the Hands of an Angry Spinner

I’ll be at the First Annual Spokane Renaissance Fair this weekend (today and tomorrow) at the Cowgirl Co-Op in Greenbluff. Come out and see me (and jousting!).

Click for directions and entrance information

Come to the Spokane Weaver’s Guild meeting tonight at 6pm at the Orchard Crest Retirement Community, 222 S. Evergreen, Spokane Valley, just south of Target.

We might just be rounding the corner on this project . . . the sheathing is close to done, and we’ll start installing windows soon.

I would dearly love to see this installation in person, but for now the multiple pictures on their website will have to do. Here’s a little taste, for you, though . . .

I have a black rotary phone on my desk . . .

This morning, I had a goat . . . an ancient goat — 16 1/2 years old. He’s started looking really ragged around the edges, as old men are wont to do, and I’d broached the subject with Farmerteen about the unlikelihood that he’d actually live forever. Piccolo (aka “Piggylo” aka “Piggy”) was older than Farmerteen, but still “giving her hell” every morning, butting his way to get grain and hay, and trying to eat her hair (it looks for all the world like the most luscious straw).
We don’t think he knew he was a goat. We think he was pretty sure he was a short alpaca.

When he moved here, he’d chase the alpacas up and down the hillside, bleating, “Wait up, guys,” and dropping some of the weight he’d put on in the flat field at his old home.
He loved saltines. He really loved all crackers, and he knew the sound of crinkling wrappers meant a yummy treat for him. If you didn’t get the cracker out soon enough, he’d paw at your leg, letting you know he knew, and that you’d better get on with it.


He went quickly, surrounded by the his fellow alpacas, and we buried him in a grove of trees this afternoon.

At this time of year, when Spokane gets even a little smattering of rain, it’s like the whole natural world breathes a sigh of relief. The leaves stretch out, there’s a lichen hanging from trees that goes from a sad, sooty black to a startling lime green, and everything suddenly looks lush and verdant.

It’s not, however, that great a thing for building. We shoved a bunch of stuff under tarps:

But what do you do with a dome? Farmerteen and I spent a hot and dusty afternoon yesterday dragging two hundred pounds of plastic sheeting back onto the dome, and rolling scaffolding and ladders around to get them out of the way and then to hold the sheets down, but it looked like we’d just end up pooling a lot of water in the folds on the not-quite-but-fairly-level deck.

The Renaissance Guy came home with a big idea: put the whole dome under a tarp . . . but what kind of tarp do you get for a 45′ diameter 5/8 ball? (Answer: a very large one). But we know, from tarping the hay, that really heavy-duty tarps can be too heavy to do anything but hold them. So he arrives with a 40 x 60′ tarp and dozens of bungee cords.

I’d like to say this went perfectly smoothly, like all our projects do. (There’s about 100 lies in that one sentence–I am so full of it, I’m attracting flies). But we did manage to get it up (dropping it from the manlift over top, using guy lines to pull it over, with the help of the O-Parents and a light breeze). I didn’t get a picture last night (though I think Oma did — I might rough her up for hers –) but here’s one from this morning, through the haze on my windshield.

and one I took for the Renaissance Guy from underneath, of the puddles that we got (which are still not the whole thing soaking and drenching the crawl space):

I am getting really good at taking my camera to weaving class and then taking no photographs with it, so I don’t have any thing to say, photographically, about the first of the six part weaving seminar. We had a great time, and I hope I didn’t overwhelm anyone with the drafting . . . I really think drafting and reading drafts is one of the hardest parts of weaving, and the whole class worked really hard to grasp all the different parts of weaving drafts. Next week, we’re working on calculating Sett and Yardage — it’s not too late to join us, if you want to. Added to the list of things to bring are the following:
1) What size of reed(s) do you have on your loom(s) at home?
2) What do you want to weave?
3) What kind of patterns would you like to use?
4) Bring a calculator! (We can certainly share — but there’s a bunch of arithmetic coming up!)

But I was going to tell you about Maynard. So after the really awesome class, Farmerteen and I went up the hill to her music class, and then decided to go see Roy Zimmerman perform at the Magic Lantern Theatre (which is good, because we were a full 1/5 of the audience — Spokane, where were you?) So we went to Huckleberries to grab some dinner, and on the way in, I saw a sign for “Citrus Trees” in front of what looked mostly like lavender bushes . . . and then, he came into view. One lone “citrus tree” — a Kumquat tree. I love kumquats, and I looked longingly at a number of kumquat trees at florists along the Seine this April, knowing I probably could not get one back in the country. And there he was. The last one. The gal at the register told me they ordered them well over a year ago, only got a few in, and that they were snatched up just like that.

Aside: Farmerteen and I take a lot of goofy pictures using the “Photobooth” on my Mac. Most of them involve her proclivity toward vampirism:

Or me crushing her head:

So we took several with Maynard this morning:
Including her favourite:

And my favourite:

And one that we caught on accident, when we kind of overloaded the computer’s working memory — or whatever it is when you ask the computer to do something, and everything comes to a grinding halt, but the whole thing doesn’t crash:

Then there was the singing . . . “Maynard, the Kumquat Tree” fits really nicely into the lyrics of the chorus of Taylor, the Latte Boy . . . to which I hadn’t realized there was a response!

. . . but the scarves created in today’s Rigid Heddle Class were beautiful, and everyone did such a wonderful job on them! One gal threw hers around her neck and said she didn’t care if it was warm outside, she planned to wear it all day . . . I hope she didn’t get too hot — it was downright sultry when I got into my car at 4pm.

This just in to my inbox . . . this little pirate guy was in my booth at ArtFest, and had a grand idea what should be done with the felted eyeballs:

check out his awesome pirate tie — I think it really makes the photo. : – )

If you’ve asked me about the scanty summer schedule of fiber classes, you’ve no doubt been treated to my diatribe on dome building, and my “other” job as a construction worker, which begins, “In 1979, my in-laws bought a geodesic dome kit, which has been moldering in a barn on the Mason Dixon . . . .”

Last summer, we finished the foundation, added the deck, and put the thing to bed just as the rains started rolling in in late October. So, last week, with the help of an emergency crew of friends (all of whom we called after 7pm Tuesday to beg them to come out at 10am on a Wednesday), we put up the first ring of triangles:

It’s not that we didn’t know this next part, but that first ring of wall doesn’t sit on the deck. It actually goes on top of a 2 foot stub wall. So, instead of taking the wall back apart (which would require the larger crew), we tied the wall together with chains (so it wouldn’t kick out), and jacked the whole thing up 2.25 feet into the air, and then put the stub wall under it.

I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to build walls from the bottom up, there being the issue of gravity and all. But we had an issue with the foundation not being as, um, perfect as we’d hoped, so we needed to know for sure where the kit walls were going to land, before adding the non-kit stub walls.

Then we added a second ring:

And began a third ring:

So I’m off, dear reader, to run the manlift, and finish off the skeleton of the dome.

Ourgra took a bunch of pics of things in the booth . . .
The amulet bags:

The “ArtFest2010 Hat” which was knit from the yarn I spun during my spinning demonstration last year:

The saccettos:

The hats:

The owl bags (and the Jayne Hat):

(The guy who got the Jayne Hat is exactly the guy I knit it for: he spotted it from across the aisle, and zeroed right in on it. He knew exactly what it was, and it had his name on it. I’m not sure which of us was more delighted in the moment).
And this year’s new line of mohair blankets: