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Thought I quickly mention this. You might have noticed that every comment on this blog is associated with an avatar. Mine has a picture of me. Most others are now associated with auto-generated avatars. (Don’t blame me if you get a bad one. It’s AUTO-GENERATED! hehehe)

WordPress uses the Gravatar system. Other places also use Gravatar for showing users’ faces (or whatever they want to show.) I think it’s pretty neat. You sign up for an account. Upload a picture or two. Add email addresses that you use for leaving comments on blogs or forums. Associate each email address with a picture you uploaded. Done. After that your chosen avatar will show up anywhere that uses Gravatar as long as you use an email address that has a Gravatar setup.

Don’t you want to set one up? :-)

Posted 17 August 2008 † Jason § Misc. ‡ Comments (13) ° Tagged: , ,

More Photos of Kate’s English Garden Angel

Yes, that’s the name I gave to the yarn that I am spinning now on Ravelry. It’s quite light and airy. I am pretty happy with the result. I just have to duplicate it for the other half of the fiber. Oy! There will be four more hours of plying. I must remember not to start the process too late in the evening.


Click on them to go to Flickr and see the photos in their original uploaded sizes. You can sort of see the sparks. But they don’t look anything like what you can see in real person. Full of colors and fires. Silver Hologram Angelina is quite amazing.

Posted 16 August 2008 † Jason § Spinning ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged: , , ,

It Pays To Be On Ravelry

Yes it does. Someone I know was contacted by Spin-Off about their knitted with hand-spun project. They wanted to feature it in an article in an upcoming issue. Sorry that I have to be very, very vague. Don’t think that Spin-Off would appreciate any info leaked out on issues not yet published. What I am saying is that get your projects listed on Ravelry. Give details. Lots of details. Take serious photos of your projects. Make them beautiful. Tag them smartly. Someone just might want to show off your items in their publications.

Did I give anything away? No? Good. In other news. I got a new toy!

I blame Chris for this. He got me to start text messaging seriously. (It’s great for an introvert. :lol: ) I had to get a proper tool for that! Great timing though. I was up for a nice discount for phone upgrade. So I got this green LG Rumor. Apparently the green represents green earth, being green. I didn’t know that. What a nice surprise. I feel so connected! :lol:

Thanks for a giant box of tea and cotton fiber, Chris! I will make you proud!

I’ve been busy spinning, too. A couple of hours each day. I did plying last night. Man! It took 4 hours to finish the 774 yards of 2-ply Merino/Angelina. And it’s only half done. Got about 4 more oz left to do. I think it’s quite nice though. Here are a couple of pictures. I will take another one when it’s dry. Hopefully it will show the sparkles better.

Posted 15 August 2008 † Jason § Life § Spinning ‡ Comments (10) ° Tagged: , ,

Kickball At Roxbury Park

A couple of priests at CB’s church, All Saints’ Beverly Hills, hosted a Wednesday children’s kickball evening event throughout the month of July. Located at Roxbury Park, which is only a couple of blocks away. We decided to prepare a picnic basket (OK, there were two) and invited our good friend Tracy and her son Pace to join in the fun.

We’d never gone inside the park before. I know it’s a shame. It doesn’t look so big from the outside. But wow! It is huge. Lots of big, green areas filled with people doing yoga, tai chi, soccer, etc. There’s also a huge playground for kids. The church rented the small baseball field for kickball. Most of us arrived early enough to have a quick picnic before the game started. I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking:

It was really, really fun. The park is so nice that we wished that we visited more often. I think there will be many nights that we just pick up a couple of beach chairs and walk down to the park for the evening. Doggies allowed on leash. And, I am thinking, what a nice place for knitting and spinning. You know what I mean? :-)

More photos here.

Posted 31 July 2008 † Jason § Family & Friends § Life ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged: , , , ,

GLASG Meeting July 2008

July meeting was great! I didn’t do any knitting or spinning. As it turned out, I was high (or low) on paint fumes from helping our new roomy paint her room. (Love the new color!) I was just chilling and chatting with people the whole time.

There were a lot of donated items for guild raffles. The proceeds are going to the Heifer Project in honor of Twisted Ruth (Ruth Schooley). There were tons of fiber, yarn, books, magazines and other stuff. I donated a set of five Japanese ceramic bowls.

Lots of Show n’ Tells. Hand-spun yarns. Yarns made at the Pluckyfluff Workshop. Finished knitting projects (check out Jill’s lace shawl.) And Deb and Helene’s woven pieces!

Old friends and new friends.

New roomy (with her Loch Ness Monster knitting project)!

And I met Ercil who brought her tablet weaving to the meeting. I wanted to see her tablet weaving and maybe ask a few questions. But like I said, I was high (or low) on paint fumes, and let that chance slipped away. Hope to see her in the next meeting. I also couldn’t figure out why I knew of her. Later I realized that I had seen her in Ruth’s photos of their recent gathering that included Sylvia, Stephenie Gaustad, and Joy.

Complete photo set here.

I’ve started a new spinning project. Well, maybe not totally new. I am spinning blue merino fiber that I carded with some silver hologram Angelina for sparkles. The goal is to knit a Ostrich Plumes Stole for Kate. I am also spinning this for Ruth’s Spin for Peace group on Ravelry. Yeah, I started early. :-P

Posted 30 July 2008 † Jason § Knitting § Spinning § Weaving ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged: , , ,

Remembering Twisted Ruth

Remembering Twisted Ruth just doesn’t seem the right thing to say. How can such vibrant person be no longer in this world? I am in shock. It’s hard to believe.

Our dear friend Ruth Schooley passed way Tuesday night. The person that led me physically into the spinning world by inviting me to the Greater Los Angeles Spinning Guild. The person that practically danced and pranced around at the guild meetings, bringing so much joy to all of us. The one that was so willing to share everything that she knew. Gone. She went into some kind of seizure on the way to dinner Tuesday night, went to the hospital and passed away. Ruth had a foot surgery recently. The doctor thought that blood clot traveling to the lungs could be the cause.

Recently Ruth and I had been in discussion on Flickr about cotton spinning. I’ve opened her last email to me so many times since I heard the news. In it she said:

… And I shall summon you to an audience with the Queen (that’s me) and I shall show you the Proper Way to card cotton punis.

Promise!

Ruth

Underneath the email message there’s this little button that says SEND A REPLY. It hit me really hard to realize that I would never get a reply from Ruth again. I want to demand that her promise be kept, so that I can see her and say that it was all just a bad dream. I can’t even imagine what her Roketman is going through.

Messages about Ruth are pouring in on Ravelry, Yahoo groups. Ruth was joyful, loving, generous, uplifting. Always smiling. So very adventurous. It amazes me how many hearts she had touched. She was like a Tim Russert in the fiber community. I had no idea the impact she had in so many people’s lives. This world lost a truly wonderful person, an amazing human being.

I am happy that she left behind a personal blog and an online photo album. Even though it pains me to look at them now. I am sure they will bring happier memories somewhere down the road.

Ruth’s Blog: twistedspinster.blogspot.com
Ruth’s Flickr Album: http://www.flickr.com/photos/originaltwistedspinster/
Ravelry Group in Memory of Ruth: Twisted Ruth

I grabbed some pictures of Ruth off her Flickr album. Please click on them to see some of her amazing adventures.

Note, July 19, 2008, I just found out that Ruth’s old blog is still up on the Internet. It is at www.twistedspinster.net

Posted 17 July 2008 † Jason § Family & Friends § Life ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: ,

If You Use A Vertical Swift…

Oops! I meant to blog about this in… what… April, 2007!?! (Just click on the photo below and you’ll see the date that it was taken on Flickr.) Anyway, if you use a vertical swift similar to the one that I have, and you have problem getting tightly wound yarn cakes, lubricate the moving parts a little. It can make a lot of difference. Just look at this:

Same type of yarn, just different colors. One before I oiled the swift. The other after. What a difference! I read some complaints on blogs about the tightly wound yarn cakes and remembered that I was going to make a note about it. But before you add any type of lubricant to your vertical swift, check if it is safe to do so. I am not an expert on what’s good and what’s not to use on plastic or wood. There are also parts that do not need to be and shouldn’t be lubricated. Just doing a little research before do so, OK?

Posted 15 July 2008 † Jason § Knitting ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,