Precious Princess Pepperoni

Pepper the 11 year old Aussie Cattle Dog mix had to have surgery to remove a black mole on her left side right behind her front leg. While in, she also had her teeth cleaned. She is the sweetest thing now and has slowed down alot. She is the favorite at the vet hospital and is loved by everyone to the point that the vet has asked to be in my will for custody. Here she is relaxing one of her beds with a little T-shirt so she could be more comfortable without a cone.

Pepper is hanging in my office waiting for a cookie. She is still one of the most food motivated dogs in existence and will run through all her tricks if she thinks you have a snack in your hand.

My mom had previously purchased these T-shirts for Bailey when he was a puppy because he had such thin skin that he kept tearing up, but he is too big to fit these little shirts anymore. I think she paid $1 each at Mervyns one Christmas.

The biopsy on the mole was benign so the Pepster is in good shape.

A Great Day!

Today is Valentines Day and Chinese New Year (Year of the Tiger). It was a warm sunny day and even though I woke up with aching muscles I spent the day with my spinning friends, Juliblue, Fluffysgarden, Janit, and Seashells. We celebrated Chinese New Years with dim sum picked up by Fluffysgarden at 99 Ranch Market, vegetarian egg rolls, potstickers, and a spicy broccoli carrot dish. Valentine's cookies were for dessert with some dan tat (egg tarts). We ate lunch outside on the patio table in the sun and the temperature was probably close to 80 degrees.

I started knitting the Evenstar shawl from the mystery knitalong where clue 1 was released on friday - the start of the olympic games. Everyone else was spinning and it was a wonderful way to spend the day.

Yesterday, I spent the day helping Christina move her office to a new location. It was hard work and a warm day. I haven't worked so hard or sweated so much in a long time. It was a good feeling after everything was done. A great sense of accomplishment!

Humanity Handspun

I happened upon a post on Ravelry by Tina regarding her Humanity Handspun project. She has created a "store" to sell on consignment handspun yarn in addition to raising funds for charity. I was so taken with this concept that I ran over to my handspun stash and pulled 13 skeins of yarn to contribute.

She needed to have swatches knit of each skein except for artyarns (which I had one). I knitted like a fiend over the weekend while not watching the Superbowl and mailed off my package today. I'm glad that these skein which I spun while learning to spin are going out to the wider world for a good cause.

Unexpected Sale

Since one of my goals this year is to finish works in progress with my knitting, I finally finished the Bears on Glacier scarf kit that I purchased in Ketchikan in September. The kit cost $40 and included the pattern and two skeins of merino in ecru and glacier (blue). It is an illusion pattern where you alternate the two colors and knit the same 2 rows in each color for the illusion effect.

I made some errors and had to frog parts of it and reknit the pattern. Near the end of the scarf, I discovered that I did not have enough of the ecru to complete the scarf. I wrote to Bobbi Daniels of Raven Frog Fibers to ask her opinion and she kindly offered to dye a little bit more of the ecru and send it to me. After some distractions with the USPS, I finally received it and finished my scarf. It was lovely.

I took the finished scarf to my knit group, the Infinite Knitters, at the local Starbucks and was doing a show and tell since many of them had seen me working on it. It did come out really well. Here is a photo that Liz took of me and the scarf. As you can see, if you look at the scarf head one, it just looks like bands of color, but if you look at it from an angle, you can see bears in ecru. I worked the pattern so the bears feet were all facing the same directions but were facing different directions.

A lady sitting a the next table over who was hanging with a friend saw me with my scarf and approached me and wanted to touch it and see it close up. I handed over the scarf and she then asked me how much she could buy it for. I have never sold anything that I have made so I wasn't sure if I wanted to sell it. I told her I would talk it over with my knit peeps and let her know.

After lengthly discussions with my knit peeps, Liz broke it down for me by time. I figured it took me over 60 hours to knit the scarf and if my time is worth $10/hour, I would need to charge her $600 for the scarf. This seemed outrageous. However, if my time was only worth $1/hour, the scarf would sell for $60. Then it was a decision of whether I really wanted to sell it or not.

After thinking it over, I decided to ask her for $300 plus the cost of the kit - $340. I figured that she would decide it would be too expensive and I would not have to sell it. To my surprise, she whipped out her checkbook and wrote me a check.

You can see the buyer on the right side of the photo wearing an arctic red jacket.

I donated some to charity and of course bought some more yarn....:).

2010

I have been spinning, knitting, and weaving and have been neglecting my blog. I have decided that one of my goals this year is to blog at least once a week and hopefully will be able to meet that goal.

Regarding my fiber goals this coming year, I may have too many and may be too optimistic. Here they are:

1. Have only a manageable number of knitting works in progress - at least not more than a number that I can manage to work continuously instead of being relegated to the corner.

2. Spin and knit to specifications - I joined the Fondle This! club with spinningbunny and have received my January offering which entails spinning 4 ounces of merino in the abalone colorway to a lace weight to be knitted to the pattern "Suppliers of Angst to Crowned Heads for More than Four Centuries."

3. To be on the yarn and fiber wagon for the year and to spin and knit the stuff that I do have.

4. Finish knitting a pair of socks.

Non-fiber related goals:

1. Spend more time with friends - keep the connection going.

2. Get back on the exercise wagon.