Reclaiming unloved yarns

I've been keeping myself occupied recently by reading way too much stuff on Ravelry and adding to my already crippling list of hobbies. Thanks to the "Thrifty Knitters" group on Ravelry, I've been having a blast recently unraveling sweaters picked up for next to nothing at my local thrift shops. With some careful deconstruction, a sweater can be quickly reduced to 4 panels of knitted fabric awaiting the gentle tugging pressure of a 3 year old cranking the handle of my antique skein winder. In a matter of moments, the fabric is reduced to a skein of interesting yarn ready for a soak in scalding hot water and then hanging to dry while the kinks of its previous life surrender to gravity.

Right now, there are pieces of 2 sweaters folded neatly beside me. My first successful unraveling experiment is in the process of being crocheted up into a lap blanket for Sprout because she became oddly attached to the yarn during the unraveling process.

I spend a lot of time in thrift shops. I love finding cool things and giving them a renewed lease on life. Looking at sweaters as raw materials or future fiber projects has really expanded the range of yarns that I can work with. I currently have a cashmere sweater awaiting the attentions of my seam ripper, and I have almost 1/2 pound of 75% silk, 15%wool, 10% nylon fingering-weight yarn waiting to be washed and hung. What I'll do with 1300 yards of this beautiful brown yarn, I'm not sure, but the list of possibilities suggesting themselves have provided me with more entertainment than I would have thought possible from a $1.00 thrift shop find.

Once unraveled, I usually have 4-6 skeins of yarn to add to my stash. Usually, in spite of my best efforts, there's a little skein that works out to about 15-25 yards. I hate to throw it away but couldn't figure out a real use for it. Then I had a brainstorm. The small skein becomes a swatch skein, perfect for swatching the project before winding the skeins on the ball winder. I staple the original sweater label to paper wrapped around the mini skein with the information about the total yardage and weight available.

One disadvantage to all these skeins of reclaimed yarn is that they don't come with ball bands or care instructions. I think that I've found the perfect solution. (opens as PDF) I sat down and designed a ball band with blanks to fill in for the weight, yardage, fiber content, and care instructions for my "new" yarns. Basically, a generic ball band with all the information that I'd like to keep with each skein. Feel free to print and use the PDF for your own recycling efforts.

Fold, spindle, mutilate

I've been dragging my feet on this post for a while. To be honest, I don't like the uncertainty of all of this and it's taking so long to figure it all out that I'm feeling very adrift.

The status of things so far... I've had 3 physical/occupational therapy appointments. She gave me 6 pages of exercises intended to help with carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, de Quervain's tenosynovitis, and trigger finger. In subsequent visits, we've discussed modifications and variations of the exercises to relieve some of the discomfort and other problems that I've experienced doing the exercises as illustrated.

Last week, I met the orthopedic surgeon to whom I've been referred. Since appointments almost never start when scheduled, I brought my drop spindle to the appointment with me so that I could spin while I waited. I managed to spin for about 45 minutes in the waiting room before being escorted back to an exam room where I spun for another 20 minutes while I answered questions for the patient history and then waited for the doctor. (Met an interesting woman in her late 60s who told me with tear-filled eyes that she hadn't seen anyone spinning since visiting her grandmother as a child.)

When the doctor looked at my hands, I had the weirdest impression that he was disappointed. He reminded me so much of a young boy who opens the door to go outside after the first snow of the year only to find it disturbed by someone else's footprints. He performed a quick physical exam, gave me some instructions while he tapped on my wrists and elbows and then ordered a nerve conduction study and EMG.

The test is scheduled for next week and sounds like a laugh riot. I can't imagine why people aren't lined up around the block to have teflon coated wires poked into their muscle tissue so that electrical current can be zapped directly into the muscle to simulate nerve commands.

Between doctor's waiting rooms and my weekly depression support group, I'm getting quite a bit of spinning in. Enough that I felt justified in purchasing a "real" spindle instead of the CD drop spindles I'd mostly made do with until now. (I have a spindle that I made using a toy wheel and a dowel. It works quite nicely, but still feels somehow illegitimate.)

My new baby is an Ashford Turkish Spindle. What I love about this, and the reason that I just ***HAD*** to have it and managed to justify the purchase to myself and anyone else who would listen, is that Turkish spindles break apart leaving the spinner with a center pull ball from which to ply or knit. After spending more hours than I care to think about hand-winding 300 and some odd yards of handspun singles into a center pull ball using a make-shift nostepinde fashioned from disposable chopsticks from Sprout's favorite Chinese buffet, I realized that my hands/wrists are not equal to the task of regularly winding singles for plying. I know that I could just use my ball winder, but I have found that I lack the patience to wait that long to move forward with the next step of my spinning.

The next addition to my spinning arsenal... A Golding Aromatherapy Spindle... I've heard nothing but good things about Golding spindles from other spindlers and I can tell myself that this one has therapeutic benefits on top of the meditative benefits of the spinning itself.

On a completely unrelated note... to balance my whining about medical stuff... here are the results of an online quiz that I stumbled across thanks to Ravelry.

What Kind of Knitter Are You?

You appear to be a Knitting Apprentice. You've got the basics down pat and you might just be falling in love with this hobby. Big needles, funky yarns and simple shapes are the name of the game shudder, but it doesn't mean you don't experiment a bit, here and there. As an apprentice, you probably fall back on other people to get you through those rough spots, and if you don't know anyone who knits, you probably have a few books or online sources to tap.
http://marniemaclean.com
Take this quiz!

Image Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Galvani%27s_legs.gif

My head is spinning

RavSpinOctChallenge
Originally uploaded by MysticSpiral

I'm currently working on spinning up about an ounce and a half of black superwash merino which I've blended (in the loosest sense of the word) with glow-in-the-dark spiderweb from one of the 1,000,000 Halloween stores that has suddenly opened in the greater Dayton area. I've visited more of these stores than is my usual custom (I generally try to avoid them) because I specifically wanted phosphorescent spiderweb rather than black light spiderweb. On some level, it disturbs me that these shops spring up to sell fetish costumes to 7-year-old girls and then they pack up and disappear for another year on Nov. 1st. I actually tried to find what I needed at one of the Foy's stores in historic downtown Fairborn, Ohio. I always kinda liked Foy's and I like that they are a small, locally owned company with strong ties to the community in which they're based and that they operate their stores/businesses year round instead of only seasonally.

I've learned that glow-in-the-dark spiderweb doesn't draft well at all. Spinning with this stuff is a little like wrestling with a toddler while you attempt to brush rubber cement out of her hair. (or at least that's what I'm guessing, so far Sprout has stayed away from the rubber cement...) I don't think that I've ever spun anything this inconsistent. Heather may joke that i'm some kind of spinning prodigy but I'm tempted to post pictures of this stuff, once I finish it and get it posted for the spindling challenge, to the beginning spinners forums as an example of the kind of drafting challenges that will be overcome with practice and well prepared fiber.

Don't get me wrong... Part of me looks at the masses of this stuff that I'm going to have left over (I bought two bags of the stuff when I finally found it at the 5th Halloween store that I went to) and thinks, "Surely this would work better if I had access to a drum carder and could incorporate it into a nice fluffy batt."

I should write something about the results of my hand adventures but since I'm still processing and I won't actually meet the specialist until Wednesday, I don't really feel like I have much to report.

Likewise, my adventures in random psychopharm roulette have yeilded a combination/doseage about which I feel mildly optimistic but I don't want to say too much too soon. I've been attending meetings of a support group for people dealing with depression (including family, friends, care givers, etc although none of those have shown up yet...), but don't really feel like I can blog about that except to say that if I get nothing more out of these meetings than an uninterrupted hour to spin each week it will be better for my mental health than almost anything that I have yet tried.

Handle With Care

I made an appointment for Monday with a hand therapist at a local sports medicine clinic. I had delayed for two weeks since my doctor referred me with excuses about not being able to find childcare. It turns out, the clinic is attached to one of our local YMCAs. (Not the one where Sprout has her swim lessons and soccer and where I take bellydance classes... this one is actually closer to home.) One of the advantages to this is that I can put Sprout in the nursery at the Y during my meeting. I'm not sure if it will be free (I'm a member and they do offer members free childcare for 2 hours a day while they're at the Y...) or if I'll have to pay (a dollar an hour, it's not going to break the bank) since I won't actually be using the Y itself...

What I realized, after I'd hung up, was that I knew a week ago that if I couldn't find any other way, the clinic is open early enough that I could schedule the appointments in such a way that I could leave Sprout with her daddy while I went to my hand therapy. With that acknowledgment fresh in my mind, I had to admit that I didn't make the appointment because I'm a little afraid.

As I said in my previous entry, I didn't have much time to process what was going on between the CTS diagnosis and my first surgery last time around. Any concerns that I might have had about surgery were completely overshadowed by the suggestion that the tendons in my thumbs were so bad that the muscles had atrophied, possibly beyond the point of recovery, and that I might not regain the full use of my thumbs. Opposable thumbs are good things, I like mine, I wouldn't want defective tendons to drag me backwards on the evolutionary ladder.

I've learned a lot since then and met people who've had less favorable outcomes from their CTS surgeries than I had. I also know that there are some different factors to consider with a repeat surgery. The questions that need to be addressed now are "Why am I having a recurrance of symptoms?" the surgery cut my carpal ligament, the nerve pressure should have been resolved. And, yet, I'm loosing sensation in my fingers and my motor control is suffering. What is the source of the pressure causing these problems? Is it scar tissue? was the ligament release incomplete? Is there some underlying medical concern that was mis attributed to CTS? How will these things be corrected? Surgery? Will therapy do the trick? If surgery, am I possibly looking at implants or vein wraps? I've never had any kind of graft procedure before and I'm a little worried about what might be involved...

And, to change the subject (or maybe not) there's the whole question of how this will effect our decision to have (or not) another baby. The last time around, I made the appointment with the specialist at about the same time that we'd planned on starting our family planning/expansion efforts. The surgeries, and the financial recovery after we saw how much the insurance wasn't covering, postponed our child-making plans by almost 3 years. I'll be 39 in 2 weeks. If we're going to have another baby, we need to start trying soon. We might get pregnant right away, but last time around (between PCOS and my miscarriage) it took us 3 years to have Sprout.

I'm feeling very adrift about all of this. Conflicted. I love being a mom and love having Sprout in my life. I know that she would enjoy having a sibling. She loves babies so much and is so excited by them. There would be an almost 4 year age difference between her and a sibling if we got pregnant right now. But if surgery is a possibility down the road rather than right now, how much harder would it be with an infant and a 4-5 year old? What if I don't need surgery now but I get pregnant and the CTS gets worse? (it's actually not uncommon for that to happen)

Well, I need to spend some quality time with my little girl. This stream of consciousness blogging is just taking me in circles and Sprout wants someone to play with her...

Image Note: An engraved illustration by Gérard de Lairesse from a 17th century Dutch anatomy text.

Review: The Bob Books from Scholastic

The information about this series came into my inbox at a particularly appropriate time. For some time, Sprout has exhibited many of the signs of reading readiness, including the ability to identify the letters of the alphabet in both upper and lower case, basic understanding of the primary sounds of individual letters, and (most importantly) a strong desire to move forward in her acquisition of language. She often asks what words are by spelling them, i.e. when we're driving and she sees a traffic sign she will read the letters off of the sign and ask what they spell. She also remembers many of the words that she's been exposed to previously. All of which is meant to say that, although Sprout is barely 3, I did not believe that it was too soon to try her on something like the Bob Books even though they are intended for an audience of 4-6 year olds.

When the box arrived, I was excited to open it and begin looking through the materials. I had already visited the Bob Books website and was a little disappointed that there was not more guidance from the site on how to get started. The support materials on the website were limited to a single PDF coloring page per 12 book box set. Unfortunately, the box and individual books didn't contain much further guidance.

Sprout did, indeed, read the first book with no problem. Unfortunately, the feeling of accomplishment didn't bring with it any desire to pick up the second book. I suggested that we read "Her Books" at least once every day for a week and she responded every time by saying that she wanted me to read to her and not the other way around. After several days, I tried another strategy, "We'll read the first two Bob Books together and then you can choose any 4 books off your bookshelf for me to read to you." She agreed, we breezed through the first book a second time and then made it through 8 of the 12 pages of the second book before she seemed bored with it and completely uninterested even in having me read the books she was supposed to choose from the shelves. It was beginning to seem as though the Bob Books were inspiring a lack of interest in reading.

I was a little uncertain of how to proceed. Surely I couldn't be the only parent who had ever gotten this reaction from the program. I could really have used more support materials from the website or the packaging inserts. I'd talked to a couple of the other moms on Sprout's soccer team and learned that one of them had tried the Bob series with great success. I asked a few probing questions and realized that she had a much more structured routine with her children than we've ever tried with Sprout. I tried to structure our "study" time a bit more but Sprout interpretted my efforts as a punishment and resisted even more strongly. I got similar responses to bribes ("let's read and then we can go to the park") and attempts to make it into a game by "Playing School."

To make matters worse, she had almost completely stopped many of her earlier reading readiness behaviors. She was no longer reading off the letters on traffic signs to ask what they said, no longer pointing to words that she knew when she saw them spelled out in the "real world." I abandoned the series mid-way through the 5th book for fear that maybe she just hadn't developed the attention span required to make it through the series and we'd be better off trying again in a year or so, once she had reached the target age for the books.

Sprout's soccer coach, "Miss B," has been homeschooling her older daughter for the last 2 years. Miss B's younger daughter, Em, is 4 and will be enrolling in a pre-k class in the very near future. I called Miss B and asked if she thought that she and Em might like to try the Bob Books. She was very interested in giving them a try. We talked very briefly after Saturday's soccer game and Miss B says that they've worked through the first couple of books in the series in the week that they've had them but indicated that she was having some similar problems getting Em to focus.

I've been trying to work out some games and activities that we can do to try to make the books more fun for Sprout. I've added to our collection of alphabet magnets and I'm thinking that we may be able to make the process of reading the books a little more interactive by using the letter magnets to act out the process of sounding out words. I may also try to encourage Sprout's impulse to build on the sentences in the books by composing additional lines of text using the magnets.

Lest you think that my feelings are entirely negative, they're not. I think that the Bob Books have a lot to offer. They're a great concept and the illustrations are simple enough that I'm thinking I can help Sprout write and illustrate new stories or build upon the ones we have. I don't know if my difficulties are a result of Sprout being so much younger than the target audience, or if perhaps our less structured lifestyle has left her ill-equipped to follow instructions and concentrate for a lesson. I'll be continuing to work with her some on the challenge of staying on task for a period of structured activity.

In short, I like the concept of the books, I like the approach and the execution. I'd like to see more support for parents from Scholastic via packaging inserts or web support. I also think that it would be quite simple to develop a series of related activities that built upon the books which could be delivered via the Bob Books website, something more than a single coloring page per boxed set of books.

The series has been around for something like 30 years and a great many people have enjoyed great success with it. If you're concerned that your child might have the same type of attention problems that Sprout has shown, it would be well worth checking to see if your local library has the books in their catalog. That said, the first set is not very expensive and I think that I would find it well worth the investment to have the flexibility to put the books away for a period of time and try again later.

This is the second of the sponsored reviews for Mother-Talk.com that I mentioned here. You can see the first review by following this link.

Give a girl a hand

I started having problems with my hands when I was in college. Pain... loss of sensation... loss of control... As a 22 year old, during a particularly bad period, I went to the campus health center and was told that I was most likely dealing with arthritis. I was a child and it never occurred to me to ask for a second opinion.

In the spring of 1999, after spending an intense period of time working on some hand-built porcelain vessels that I wanted to use for a grant proposal, the problems with my hands reached a new extreme. I felt as though I had lost all fine motor control. When I tried to hold something, my grip was so tight that the item would crush in my hands. A tiny vessel, which had taken hours to build and was nearly finished might be crushed to dust in my hands when I thought that I was gently holding it. At the same time, I would try to grip things tightly and they would slip from my grasp to the floor.

Within a month, I had the first of 6 hand surgeries which were spaced out over a period of 8 months. The diagnosis was Carpal Tunnel, Tendonitis and ancillary nerve damage. From diagnosis to the first surgery, I was so busy with blood tests and surgery prep that I didn't have time to think about what was happening.

Soon I will be seeing a hand specialist for a "pre-surgical consultation." I don't know if we will ultimately choose surgery, and I know that it is unlikely that we would have to repeat all of it, but I'm a little freaked out. I don't want to repeat any of it. I honestly don't know how I'd manage life with Sprout during my recovery. I can't manage life with an energetic, high-needs three-year-old as it is. I've had the number for the physical/occupational therapist for almost a week and haven't scheduled my first appointment because I just can't seem to find a childcare solution. We considered enrolling her in preschool. The problem is that preschool is 3 hours 3 mornings a week. I would spend 1/2 hour of that driving her daddy to work after we dropped her off, another 45 minutes driving to the physical therapist's office, it takes another 1/2 hour to get from the physical therapist's office to the preschool which means that if the appointment is an hour, I have exactly fifteen minutes margin for delayed appointments or traffic problems. I'm not sure it's possible but I am almost certain that the stress will drive me around the twist.

Of course, the way that today has been going, I'm probably going to run away from home. As an indigent living on the streets in the midwest, scheduling medical appointments will probably be the last of my worries. What is it about 3 year olds that inspires them to bite and hit when they don't get their way. It's not like ***We've*** ever modeled that behavior, although I will admit that I really, really wanted to hit her with a rolled up newspaper when she bit me the second time in less than a minute.

The good news is that tomorrow is my bellydance class. It's the thing that I look forward to all week and the thing that really gets me through right now. Between dance class and trying to find my way around Ravelry, I'm starting to remember that there's a world out there that has nothing to do with preschoolers.

Image: Georgia O'Keefe: Hands with Thimble photograph by Alfred Stieglitz

Review: Maximum Ride 3

When I started reading Maximum Ride #3: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports, I wasn't really sure what to think. I think that a lot of the problem for me comes from the fact that I had not read either of the first two books. I can't recommend jumping into the series with the third book. There are quite a few moments in the book where allusions are made to events which occurred in the previous volumes which seem like they'd be more meaningful with greater knowledge of the series. Since I haven't read the previous books, I'll talk some about what I liked about this book and why I think that it might be worth picking up the first two and reading the entire series.

James Patterson is a very prolific writer with a rather impressive bibliography. It is particularly impressive to me that he can switch from suspense and crime novels intended for an adult audience to SF/Fantasy/Adventure intended for an audience of adolescents. I will admit that, as a grown-up, I found some of the plotting a bit facile and some of the dialog a bit forced, I'm really not the intended audience. Once I put away my prejudices and just turned myself over to the book, I found it very engaging and quite enjoyable.

I really admire the handling of technology in this book. It would be easy, given a corporate monster with the resources to build robots and genetically altered humans, to over-emphasize technology. While technology is present in the books, its use is more in keeping with the technologies that the kids reading the book use every day. Rather than using tech solutions, most of the conflicts in the story are settled with ingenuity and/or fists and kicks.

And speaking of fists and kicks. The fight sequences are fast paced and walk a delicate balance between graphic descriptions of adrenaline fueled fighting for survival and acknowledging that the audience may not be ready for graphic descriptions of injuries and/or brutality. (One of the problems that I had, having not read the previous books, was that I was uncertain on several occasions whether past events were glossed over because the author assumed that the reader had read the first books, or whether it was an artistic choice to leave the descriptions vague so as not to disturb the sensibilities of his younger audience and/or their parents.

Ultimately, I'm feeling positively about the series not so much because of anything that I can write up in a review, but because I closed the book wishing that I was a 14 year old girl with an unshakable faith I could change the world and that I am a vital part of an untapped resource for positive change. These feelings are what I believe will keep kids turning pages and inspire them to search out books that offer that kind of affirmation and encouragement.

In the end, I wanted to read this book because I wanted to see what was out there for the tween and teen children of my friends. A lot of people are asking right now about what will follow Harry Potter. I'm not sure that it matters what kids pick up next as long as they pick up something. Maximum Ride offers them a story with protagonists their own age who are setting out to make a tangible difference. We could do a lot worse.

[ETA -- I hate it when I save a post rather than publishing it...]

Too long no post

Last night I arrived home from the family Florida vacation. Sprout had a great time and really got the opportunity to get to know my sister who was visiting from Germany. We had a small family birthday party in the condo and Sprout got to swim in the ocean and in the pool at the condo at least twice a day. Her swimming is improving by leaps and bounds.

While there, I found the time to read the first book that I'm reviewing for Mother-Talk.com. I'll be posting my review on Wednesday. In the interim, some of the 100 bloggers participating in the blog tour have posted their reviews and you can read highlights or pop over to the blogs themselves from the blog tour post on the Mother Talk website.

Gone Fishin'

fishin
Originally uploaded by MysticSpiral

Etsy's having a poster contest related to the whole treasury concept. Although I'm not currently selling through my Etsy shop, I am trying to maintain a presence so that when I re-open the shop I won't have to start over from scratch... I'm enjoying having the extra time to do things like searching for fish themed ceramics to pull together an interesting presentation.

Sterling Bead Bail

beadbale
Originally uploaded by MysticSpiral

I'm looking for a wholesale source for these findings. They're sterling silver, although I saw them in silver plate as well, with attached wires for stringing focal beads to make pendants. They seem like the perfect solution for making pendants from some of my more elaborate focal beads. Any help would be greatly appreciated.