The weather was good enough to let us meeting outside. Aviva called us to order.

Treasurer’s Report:

Nancy reported that our balance as of February 23 was $564.18 based on her calculations. Nancy had not received the latest bank statement from Lotus yet so the balance has not been reconciled.

Old & New Business (Except for Stitches Reports):

Several of our members signed up to demonstrate at Hidden Villa on April 2. Cookie and Nancy Derham were the meeting attendees who’d signed up.

Show & Tell:

Cookie went to a workshop by the owner of Meridian Fibers. She got lessons on how to skirt fleeces, as well as on sheep husbandry. Cookie shows us samples of the brown, gray, and white fleece she got at the class. Half of each sample had been washed and the other half left in its natural, greasy state.

Laura unwrapped an 11″ support spindle she’d just received from someone on Ravelry who had been working hard at stash reduction. Laura has been working this past month on an old Clemes & Clemes drum carder. She has cleaned it and used epoxy to fix the worst of the damage. She showed us some Easter colored batts from her now well-behaved carder. Laura has been using toilet paper rolls to hold the singles she winds off from her spindles. Her latest prize is half an ounce of guanaco.

Inspired by Cookie, Kelly bought a cutting board, used wood burning to decorate it with sheep, and bought carding cloth. Kelly has not yet fully assembled the components into a carding board. Kelly got dowels to doff fiber from her board at Home Depot. The folks there have a service for cutting dowels and boards to size.

Kelly is spinning a silk / merino blend she bought at Stitches from a vendor named Lisa.

Nancy learned the Magic Knot technique — or perhaps more accurately, has succeeded a couple of times and is just beginning to work on getting it down pat. This is an old technique used to join threads and yarns. If done well, the knot is barely findable. You can even cut off the ends and the knot will stay. Nancy spotted a fellow sock knitter in a waiting room at Kaiser using the technique to make stripped socks the hard way (i.e. not with self striping yarn). Nancy found instructions for the technique on-line and is working to learn how to do it. She demonstrated following directions to make a knot in the pair of socks she was knitting. After knitting a row or two more, she managed to find the knot again for a phot. Nancy wore her finished pair of multi-cuff socks.

Aviva was spinning some mystery batts made some time ago at one of our mystery batt meetings. She is planning to give them to a woman that knits stuffed dragons for babies. Aviva, too, went to Stitches and did a pretty good job of restraining herself. She came home with yarn for two projects plus a modest amount of fiber. The fiber was from a vendor, Abstract Fiber, that Aviva knew from a previous encounter at Blacksheep Gathering up in Oregon. Aviva fell for a bag of yak/merino blend and a couple of other small bags of yummy fiber.

Sharolene knitted a garment — a snood? — for a friend. This is a garment that one wears pulled down around the shoulders. After ad libbing a pattern, Sharolene learned that normally such a garment has shaping at the top to help it stay in place. She plans to retrofit it with ribbing as soon as she can settle on a pretty design that will mesh with the existing cable pattern. The snood was knit from alpaca.

Sharolene also showed us some beautiful yarn spun from multiple shades of blue. She started with 4 colors and mixed half of each with its neighboring colors. She spun this Polwarth into the skeins. Sharolene also fell for some of the lush fiber from Abstract Fiber at Stitches. She got a silk/yak/merino blend. She has already blended lots and spun up some red/purple/black yarn.

 

Ginger didn’t do much spinning over the past month. She’s back to sorting and decluttering. She is working on a Christmas season themed afghan made from commercial yarn.