sweetgeorgia

Schacht Squak

The new wheel is here and all settled into our living room. See…

So the wheel arrived at my office at 11:45 am on Monday morning and, of course, I opened up the box to check that everything was ok and intact. We brought the wheel home and then I had myself a little adventure trying to get the treadles to snap onto the little front leg bars. It was hard! When the manual says you can do it with “a sharp blow with the heel of your hand or a light tap with a hammer on a piece of wood placed on the treadle over the bearing” — no way. I had to bang those treadles in pretty hard with a hammer. It was traumatizing — getting a brand new shiny wheel and then hammering the beejeezus out of it right away!

The rest of the assembly was fine… I oiled all the bits I was instructed to oil, but I was getting tons of squeaks everywhere… the treadles, the footmen, etc. So I oiled some more… I used up all the sewing machine oil in the house and then started using mineral oil. Both oils were too light, but it’s what I had available at the time. So by the end of Monday night, I just had a squeak on one of the treadles. It sounded like “squeak… squeak… (and then when you stop treadling and let the wheel slow down) … squuuaaaaak”

Luckily, Cal at Shuttleworks read my mind and sent me a bottle of Schacht Spinning Wheel Oil that arrived Tuesday afternoon. It came with a note saying “I thought you might need some oil.” Awesome service, I tell you. So I used the new oil on the wheel last night and, ta da, no more squeaking! It will be 20 or 30 weight motor oil from now on.

I spun on the new wheel for about 2 1/2 hours last night and am making nice fine merino singles… (Yes, this is still that Ashland Bay merino that I bought in May!) The wheel is now running nice and smoothly — it’s so quiet too.

Sure, a Woolee Winder would be very nice for this wheel, but I do like how the flyer hooks are all on one side of the flyer and slightly staggered… This way you can pack more on the bobbin. You could also lace the yarn back and forth to reduce the pull-in if you are spinning laceweight stuff. I still prefer that sliding flyer hook that’s on some wheels (Majacraft, Lendrum) but this will do!

In *grr* news, my dyeable yarn order is lost in the mail.

And in *whoa technology* news, go see June’s entry about Bioclipped fleeces. Crazy.

Confessions of an ex-foodie

I have a confession to make. I don’t cook.

It’s not that I don’t know how or don’t like to cook, I just don’t… It’s a time/energy issue. When I leave the office, the last thing I want to do is spend an hour or more making dinner. I love cooking and have more cookbooks and foodie magazines than I do knitting and spinning books. Impossible, I know! But nearly every day, my husband and I have dinner at various cafés or restaurants nearby. It’s $5 bowls of pho (Vietnamese Beef Noodle Soup), $3 bowls of congee (rice porridge with stuff in it), $5 Malaysian curry from Hawkers’ Delight on Main Street, or a huge piece (we split) of Sicilian lasagna from the Brioche Bakery across from my office. It’s easy.

On the rare occasion that we do cook, we (read “he”) make Ma-Po Tofu and corn soup. Ah yes. Super healthy, eh! But this weekend, I decided to crack open my new cookbook from La Regalade and make their Beef Bourguinon (Jen G, if you are reading this, you are not allowed to buy this cookbook for yourself). You will recall last year when the DH made us Anthony Bourdain’s version of this dish. This is mine:

Whereas the Bourdain version was made in the dutch oven on the stove, Alain Rayé’s version is made by braising in the oven for about 2 1/2 hours. The potatoes are baked in heavy cream alongside in the oven for the last one hour of cooking. So simple. So easy. I just might do it again.

For those of you who want to taste the real deal, make yourselves a reservation at La Regalade in West Vancouver. Oh, and make a day out of it and visit the Knit & Stitch Shoppe too!

Dye happy.

It was terribly unfortunate that my yarn order hadn’t arrived by the weekend, so I had no yarn to dye! Agh. Well. In lieu of dyeable yarn, I dyed some wool and silk noil over the weekend…

Last Wednesday was our last spinning/dyeing class and so we did some handpainting with Procion dyes. I’d never used Procion before, so this was a good, new experience. Procion dyes are used for low temperature dyeing of cellulose fibers including cotton, linen, rayon, and ramie. It also dyes silk. Procion comes in both a powder or liquid form and we used powders to mix dye stocks.

I forgot to bring fibre to dye, but did purchase 1 lb. of tussah silk noil from the instructor which I used for dyeing. This silk noil was cheap — about $16 CAD per pound. And one pound of silk noil is about the size of a bedspread! Of course, it does come with complimentary silkworm bits that you have to pick out…but did I mention it was cheap? When I get my drum carder, I want to blend the silk noil with some other fibres for some textured yarns.

Also, one of my classmates had given me a lock of ramie fibre a couple weeks ago that I pulled out and handpainted. This fibre turns out so shiny! But feels a little like really soft linen. I was very impressed with how the colours turn out so vibrant.

I did get an order of new dyes from ProChem last week that I wanted to try out — some new Lanaset and WashFast colours in several shades of green and red. So I did some hot pour dyeing with wool — basically, you place the wool in a shallow amount of water (just enough to cover), then pour a little bit of dye onto sections of the wool. Wait for it to strike and exhaust, then add other colours to the other sections. Oddly, some of the dye colours separated a bit, so something that was supposed to be burgundy separated into reds and violets.

Two and a half hours until the new wheel arrives!!

Restraint. Not one of my strong points.

Well. I’m getting a new wheel.

I called Cal at Shuttleworks yesterday afternoon and placed my order for the Schacht Matchless DT. I am completely without patience and lucky for me, Cal had a brand new box in the shop that he shipped out immediately. So the new wheel will be arriving on Monday before noon!

I can’t wait! But no, I can wait. See? I’m waiting, adult-style.

Sucked back in.

Yep. I’m knitting a Jaywalker sock. And yes, I joined the KAL.

Let’s see how far I get with this KAL… No wait, let’s see how long I can restrain myself from also joining Cara’s “Crossed in Translation” KAL for this amazing sweater.