The wedding

I've been sick for days, but with the help of my whole family - we pulled the wedding off.

The weather was great, the house was decorated, the out of town guests arrived safely, Grandma got ordained so she could perform the ceremony, the cakes were baked, the dress was perfect, the groom was sober and not hung over, the family and friends were mostly on time, the bride was beautiful, all in all - not bad for a wedding pulled together in 5 weeks.

I put captions on most of the pics. Here is a small selection from the over 400 pictures taken by DeVia and I. I'm hoping to get copies from everyone else.

Catching up

Ok, there's a lot going on in my family and around my house...

I'm going to try and catch you all up in one post with lots of pictures.

Halloween - we had lots of kids this year - went thru 2 large bags of candy and had to shut our porch light out at 8 pm. Here's a cute pic of Summer and Zach - niece and nephew




I finished three shawls.
Another brown handspun Forest Canopy for my sister Juanita,


a commercial yarn Forest Canopy for Mom,


and my Kiri out of handspun exotics for me me me.







Here are some gratuitous cat pron... We have 4 cats - a 14 year old long haired calico - Cameo - my sweet old gal.


Two adults - Candy



and Stormy,




and a youngster - Baker Baker.



Here's a shot of them all on the bed at once - this rarely happens. Cameo is picky and doesn't like any of the others to come close to her.




Here's the reason we bought the new couch - Maegan and Sarah spend the night at our house almost every other weekend - this new couch gives them both room to sleep on it


The couch also got put to good use on Thanksgiving - the reclining feature was appreciated by all - my son and some of the girls


My mom and a couple of sisters



The kids had a good time at Thanksgiving - look at them playing fort under the table.



I have to finish the last minute details for my sons wedding this weekend. I'll probably have more updates soon.

Kiri finally done

No pictures yet, I just sewed in the ends last night.

At SOAR this year, I received a number of exotic fibers as samples from peace of yarn.

There was cashmere, cashmere/silk, ultra fine merino, angora, yak, camel down, etc...

About 1.5 ounces total for 10 different fibers - most of them white or off white.

When I got home, I scored an electric drum carder with a fine drum, so I carded all the white and off white exotic fibers together with some merino I already had. I added about 25% more in bleached tussah silk to get four ounces of yummy batts.

I spun it medium fine laceweight and the single came out slightly slubby in places, but pretty.

I already had 3/4 bobbin of very fine bleached tussah singles for a different project that I had stalled on - so I plyed those two together to get 1200 yards of a very pretty off white yarn - total weight a little less than 5 ounces.

I have knit the Forest Canopy Shawl 6 times so far and wanted to do a different one.I like my shawl knitting to be a memorizable pattern - written with a chart, but a small enough repeat to be able to knit without looking at the pattern every row every stitch. Kiri fit the bill perfectly.

So, in between the felted bags and the watch caps that I've made for holiday presents, I finally finished knitting the shawl. This was my take along knitting. Everyone at work has seen me knitting it and are waiting for me to wear it to work.

I have less than about 20 yards of the yarn left and did 20 repeats of the pattern rather than the 14 called for. I dressed it on to my 7 foot triangle loom to see if I was going to be able to block it on there like I've done all my other shawls and it fit, but a very soft block. Once I wet it down with a sprayer, the shawl sagged and I was afraid it was going to stretch all out of shape. As it is, it's very large on me and I love it.

I finished it last Friday and then sewed in the ends last night so that I could wear it to my guild meeting.

I'm hoping to get some pics of it soon