Sock-a-holic Katie came down and played Keggle with Jacki and I yesterday. That’s always a lot of fun. We dyed up a ton of yarn and fiber. I spent this morning washing it all out. I wash and Jacki spins and hangs. A system, we has it.

We decided to do a big dinner today. Ok Jacki thought of it, but I agreed it was good idea. So the Irish St. Patty’s day dinner was organized. Beer bread from this recipe is really good. I used Brooklyn Brewery’s Black Chocolate Stout instead of Guinness. Mostly just because that’s what I had. Check it….

The rest of the meal is corned beef, cabbage, and baked potato. Really freaking good meal and really not all that hard to make.

We didn’t really have anything Irish to drink so we went with the New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red. It went really well with the meal.

Oh and the dogs had a good time in the yard while Katie was here. They chewed and chewed on their sticks.

Till next time. Hopefully it won’t be months before I’m motivated to post again :)

Jacki finally has a shop open again! Her Etsy shop is here. Go take a look. I’ll give you a little preview.

Have some patients and I’m sure she’ll get some more stuff up there. Those roving balls she makes are the nicest things I’ve ever spun. *sigh* There is also going to be a website for Gaslight Dyeworks. It’s not much yet, but I’ll work on it.

Some spinning that I’ve been doing lately. This is the seacell/merino blend that I got from Creatively Dyed Yarn in Wooster. Dianne’s roving is so nice to spin and looks so beautiful when it’s spun.

This one is a triple ply that is two plys of CDY and one ply of alpaca that I dyed. It’s 123 yards long and it weighs 7.25 ounces.

Then I ran out of alpaca. So I plyed the rest of the CDY bobbins into a two ply. It’s 210 yards long and weighs 4 7/8 ounces.

So it’s been a while since I posted anything. I got since I got sick (and better ;) I’ve just had this feeling of not wanting to be on the internet. I just haven’t wanted to get on and post anything. Who knows why. Anyway I have been doing some spinning and baking so on to that.

This is the first 4oz of an 8oz braid I got at Wooster from Creatively Dyed . It’s a 30% Seacell 70% Merino blend and is great to spin.

We went up to Wooster for a fiber festival a couple weeks ago. Jacki has more about that on her blog. I bought a bunch of fiber from Creatively Dyed …..

The other thing I’ve been doing is baking. Jacki got me a really nice pizza peel and the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. So I haven’t read the whole book, but so far I really like the concept of making a big batch of dough and keeping it in the fridge to use as needed. Thanks to Ava and Lola for inspiring Jacki to get me this book. So here are some pics from the first bread run….

I’ll try to be a little better about posting. Maybe……

Not much else to report at the moment. Just an all done scarf. I’m pretty happy with it. The edges towards the beginning aren’t very pretty. They got much better as I progressed. So check it out….

The close up and gallery of all the yarn pictures….

Oh and it’s 7.5 inches by 64 inches :)

Jacki finished up her rug that she had on the loom. Since I’ve been wanting to try weaving I figured this was as good a time as any to give it a go. Jacki helped me pick the yarn and get the loom warped. I’ve helped her warp the loom quite a few times, but not done a lot of the other parts of getting the loom set up to weave. I don’t think I did a great job getting my tension right. Oh well.

So the yarn is some handspun the I spun for the weft and Dream in Color’s Smooshy for the warp.

Here it is in progress…

We also cracked open a bottle of my first mead today. Not the best mead. It is getting better with age.

And to finish it up I’ve been making some more roving for rug yarn. One day we’ll have enough yarn for the rug project.

Evil kitty sits on top of her cardboard box castle and watches me spin. Just waiting for the right time to attack my fiber. :(

I finished the PINK yarn. 93 yards and 3 7/8oz. Super soft and squishy. This is about 70/30 BFL/silk blended on the hackle. We’ll have to wait and see what Jacki does with this

So we finally got around to making the beer cupcakes that we have been wanting to make for a while now. The recipe is here. Instead of using Guinness in the cupcake batter we used my homebrewed chocolate cherry porter. We also used that in the glaze to replace about half the milk. Damn good!

Also got some of the most PINK fiber ever combed up today. This is about 70/30 BFL/silk. So soft and so pink. :) I’m going to try to get it spun up in the next couple days.

So we got a ton of snow. About 20 inches in 24 hours according to the weather people. It’s been a while since I had to shovel a bunch of snow. I’m freaking sore.

This is my latest yarn. I’m calling it Grape Nutz. :) 199 yds and 5 3/8 oz. The brown ply is Sheep Shed and the other is hand dyed superwash. It was Jacki’s idea to make the brown ply with the Sheep Shed. I really like how this came out. Now Jacki just has to figure out what to do with it :)

Jacki and I took the dogs and went on a hike a few days ago. We went to Wolf Run. Nice little park just outside of town. Walked about a mile and the dogs had a great time running in the snow. Jacki took a bunch of pictures in RAW format. That lets us play with single images in HDR. So here are a few that I HDRed. All of the original images were taken by Jacki. Jacki also has a post and some pictures here.

Here is a HDR of me spinning on the Babe Wheel.

Check me out!

Kicking it off with a good beer buy. Ommegang 10th Anniversary Belgian style Chocolate Stout. I’ve been want to pick up some of this for a while. So I got 3 bottles. I’ve even still got 2 left. :) I also got my yearly 6 Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot.

A really nice picture that Jacki took…

Some yarn that I finished up today. I’m calling it Forest Moss. 83 yds 4 3/8oz.

Moving on. Got the old computer out in the garage. It’s working as a music server and hanging out in the garage out of the way.

Also had an idea a while back about getting the humidifier to work better. The thing basically works by wicking water UP a wick a pulling air up from the wick to get water into the air. The wick is always dry half way up. So why not run water down the wick? Keeping the whole wick wet should get more water into the air.

So I got an old fountain pump that was in the attic. This was powered by a solar panel. That wasn’t going to work very well in the house. So I found an old cell phone charger and hacked that into it for the power supply. Seems to be working alright. I need to make a more efficient water delivery system, but it has to be better than it was before.

Here is the overall view.

The pump tucked in the water….