Bad Blogger.

OK, I'm awful. I took a little blog vacay, and I'll admit that this post doesn't mean that it's over. It's more like a quick catch-up. I'm just not feeling it so much lately.

First, I can't not mention that I got to teach someone to spin over the 4th of July holiday. We had so much fun, and I left her with a lot of information and plans to buy a wheel right away. She's actually a mohair rancher back home, so she's interested in taking her fiber to a mill and spinning it. I haven't heard from her since; I hope that means things are going well.

Second, on the Barn Raising front, I have 12.5 more squares, for a total of 27.5 out of 42. One, obviously is incomplete (more on that later) and four haven't been blocked yet, but here are the ones from the potluck yarn I posted about last time.

I'm stalled out on the last half that I started. I spun another scrappy on a spindle, and I way overtwisted it, so my square looks a little like a pinwheel. I think that may be ok, but I need to figure out what yarn to finish knitting it with, and somewhere along the line I lost interest a little bit. But since I'm 2/3 gone, I should be able to finish it with some degree of rapidity when I take interest again (and have more scraps or spin more yarn for it.

Lastly, I finally finished up my yarn for the HHHH swap. If memory serves, this may be my first true fingering weight 2-ply yarn.

I dyed the roving myself, and I've kind of always thought of the colorway as "Arsenic and Old Lace," a la the old Cary Grant movie. Let's hope she gets the reference and doesn't think I'm trying to poison her through the mail.

More Barn Raising

Seven more squares:

I might've hit the halfway mark this week if it hadn't been for spinning this:

510 yards of Funky Carolina's "scrappies", spun one after another and Navajo plied. This way I can knit lots of squares from one yarn ball that are all different from one another.

In other news, the tree guys showed up again this morning. I told them they were finished and sent them away. Let's hope they don't come back.

I have lost.

Regarding yesterday's post: The trees are cut. The best we could do with the electric company representative was to have them trimmed under his supervision, with assurances that no more than necessary would be removed. Not that you can much tell by looking.

I'm trying not to think of it, except for this: the trees have surely been trimmed before for this purpose, so maybe in a year or so it will look better.

Save the trees!

Anyone have any experience trying to keep the electric company from doing this to your trees?

I took this picture just a few blocks away. I don't know if you can tell at this size, but it's a gaping hole out of what was a beautiful magnolia tree.

They're chopping up trees all over town and I just can't stand the thought of them doing that to my magnolia. Thankfully, the power lines don't run right through the middle of ours like that, but still, I'm not impressed with their pruning job.

They've already spent 8 hours in our yard hacking up trees I didn't much care about, relatively small growth that probably needed to go anyway, but I'm drawing the line at the magnolia. A little internet research shows that they're threatening homeowners who try to stop them ("we'll destroy your tree"), so I'm meeting with a rep tomorrow at lunch when my husband can be with me. I'm possibly a little hot under the collar to handle this rationally myself. But I'll be doing more research tonight so I'll be ready. Hopefully an offer to have the tree trimmed away from the lines at our own expense will do the trick. Wish me luck. In the meantime, my new parking place is right in front of the magnolia.

In other news, finished spinning.

580 yards of 2-ply Wensleydale, light fingering/heavy laceweight
Spunky Eclectic Club, April, "Perfect Storm"