My New Buddy

On Sunday we went up to Placerville to visit the studio of dyer and spinner extraordinaire, Lisa Souza. We took two knitters with us — one a friend from Davis, another a knitter from Baltimore we sort of adopted since she was working in Sacramento for a month. Numenius went for a bike ride while Laura, Cami and I got lost in some serious yarn for a while.

I had asked Lisa to dye me some fiber in her “Electra” colorway. The fiber is 50% merino, 25% silk, 25% bamboo, and it drapes in the most gorgeous way. Because 75% of the fibers are animal protein but silk and merino take dye at different rates, and because bamboo won’t take acid dye at all, the effect is shimmery and magical.

As I was paying for this, I noticed a dark blue-green bump of fiber in her dyeing studio. It’s Wensleydale. I shuddered and put it down — too scary. I’ve heard dozens of stories of people—good spinners—turning this super-long stapled wool into piano wire. Lisa looked at me and laughed. “It’s because they don’t listen to me,” she said. “You have to spin really low-twist and let it go, let it go, let it go.”

Let it blossom, let it snow. I have a new best friend. Two days later, I’ve finished spinning the undyed fiber she gave me to practice with and am halfway through the blue-green.

The photo of the Wensleydale sheep, above, is taken by the super-talented Birdwoman of the Birdwoman Knits blog, and I’m grateful to have such a splendid creature gracing the walls of Feathers of Hope. That’s a 10-11” staple, folks.

Settling Into Fall Footie

The answer to what am I going to do after the World Cup has been taking shape. So far the only soccer I’ve been catching on TV has been when we go to our favorite taqueria for Saturday lunch when more often than not they are showing a random footie match on their bigscreen. But following the BBC live text reports does in a pinch (it’s how we follow the Tour de France), giving us a new Saturday morning activity where I read these out to Pica over breakfast. And there’s always watching the goal highlights on YouTube. I am following Tottenham Hotspur in earnest now, finding myself surprisingly thrilled by their victory at home on Wednesday to make it into this year’s Champions League competition. Following the Champions League should be fun — it’s anybody’s guess who will win it, unlike the various national leagues.

La Liga gets started tomorrow — expect even more entertainment.

Des Reliques

My father was an avid photographer. His favorite thing to do during camping trips in Spain was to fetch out his Minolta FX with multiple lenses and take close-ups of wildflowers. His attempts at landscapes were less successful and of wildlife even less so, but this didn’t alter the fact that during my adolescence the fridge was always full of beer—and film.

Dad died in 1999. Film was still in the fridge, now on the Northern California coast. We brought it back with us to Davis because you can’t waste film.

I just checked the dairy section of the fridge. It contains two rolls of Kodak Gold 400 (undoubtedly for my mother, who still shoots in film/ it will be on its way to her shortly), one roll of Kodachrome 64, and one roll of Kodachrome 25.

We’d better shoot this final roll of 25 because after December, there won’t be anyone left who will develop it professionally. I don’t know what we’ll shoot. Probably a lot of morning glory, which is improbably in flower and which my Dad took in spades.

A Week Behind The Typecase

I just spent the past five days taking the letterpress intensive course at the San Francisco Center for the Book. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my new-found printing skills, but it was a lot of fun. We worked with the four Vandercook presses the center has, and produced personal stationery, a broadside of a quote our choice, and at the end of the week we reprinted the text from our broadsides to make up the parts for a pamphlet-bound book. At left is my broadside — two quotes on cats — printed in a rather beat-up 18 point Caslon font. Composing type a pretty intense process, but metal type is beautiful to work with. It’s quite neat to see one’s text laid out in shiny gray metal in the bed of the press, reading backwards of course!

The Small Red Triangle

It came upon me while I wasn’t looking, this thing. Someone I know knows someone who does therapy and by the way she also teaches qigong. What I knew about qigong was that it’s a great Scrabble word and is somehow related to, but not the same as, tai chi, which I’d seen someone’s Shanghaiese mother doing outside Dryden House in Cambridge. It looked strange and flowing and mesmerizing and sure, I’ll go.

Breathing. The medical set. Hitting (it our case it’s a lot more like tapping). Sequences I still haven’t memorized but that become familiar as C. describes the pathways, the flow. The end of our session often — always? — consists of sitting, of meditation. We are an unruly lot of women who’d mostly prefer to be moving about rather than facing whatever it is that sitting still for five minutes will reveal; C. knows this and she just works it in at the end, when we’re all pliable, when there’s no ducking out.

Picture a small red triangle, smaller than a pea, she says. Draw a line from your cranium through your center to three fingers below your navel. The triangle sits there. Red and luminous. Focus on the triangle. (She knows unruly minds will race and she is trying to keep us here, rather than thinking about what we will have for dinner or the laundry or the paintings we want to paint or the words we want to write. Think about the triangle. Here. Be present.)

The dreaded five minutes come and go and still we sit, moving the energy up into our hearts and back into the circle where it is offered back out to the suffering world…

Mr. Ibis Returns

Judging by older blog posts we have a pattern here. In August when they cut the alfalfa and irrigate, the white-faced ibis having recently returned to the area from their summertime jaunts find the flooded fields and settle in for an hour or several of feeding. Often they show up quite close to the house, as they do here.

Tour de Fleece

As you might have guessed from the photos, below, I’ve been spinning a lot lately. I’m participating in the Tour de Fleece, which is a (fiber) spinning event that coincides in time with the Tour de France. Different categories separate different spinners, and you can join teams. I’m in Team Rookies since it really is less than a year since I got my wheel, hard to believe. I’m also in Team JulieSpins because the fiber I’m spinning — a soft-as-butter Blue-faced Leicester — was dyed by the hugely talented Julie Sandell of Massachusetts, whose work can be found here and here.

The Tour de France ends on Sunday, and I find myself gathering my wits, cats, and early hours to try and get all the fiber spun. I separated all 30 ounces out into vague color likenesses, and decided on a traditional 3-ply (versus Navajo, or chain, ply, which would have preserved longer color repeats but which is inherently less stable and uneven than the teutonic solidity of a 3-ply). I could have made this a lot easier for myself and gotten a lot more yarn if I’d chosen a 2-ply, but 3-ply blends the colors better and the yarn is more rounded.

I’m going to use this stuff to make a side-to-side jacket, inspired by kimono construction but tapered at the waist by means of short rows. Designing as you go results in some ripping out. I don’t mind this, I’ve discovered. Maybe in my old age i really am becoming more patient. I just hope I have enough yarn…

Yellow, pinky yellow, pinky magenta, magenta plum: I’m calling this yarn Nectarinada.

Added July 26, 2010: I finished the whole 2.5 lbs. It’s dense!!

Rivalry

Occasionally there is a game to remind us that there is more to the Giants-Dodgers rivalry (which dates back 120 years) than mocking the Dodgers fans for tossing beach balls around their home stadium. Last night was one of these. We missed all the good bits: the Giants’ ace pitcher, Tim Lincecum, started off badly, walking the first batter of the game on four pitches and giving up a home run in the first inning to put the Giants behind 3-0. Things were showing no sign of improving, so I turned off the radio. Checking in online in the top of the 9th, I delight to see an update come in where the Giants take the lead 6-5 on an Andres Torres double, and turn the radio back on. I learn that in the interim, the following has happened:

1) Tim Lincecum (who is lacking control this evening, remember) hits Dodgers batter Matt Kemp with a pitch. He charges the mound; players swarm to restrain the two. The Dodgers’ bench coach gets quite irate. The umpire warns both benches.

2) The reliever who takes over for Lincecum, Denny Bautista, throws a couple of pitches that go inside; the Dodgers’ bench coach yells something about this and gets ejected as a result.

3) The Dodgers retaliate. In the top of the 7th, their starter Clayton Kershaw hits Aaron Rowand with his first pitch of the inning. Having been warned, Kershaw and Dodgers manager Joe Torre get ejected. Dodgers coach Don Mattingly steps in for Torre.

4) Somehow through all this the Giants claw back from 5-1 to 5-4.

5) It is the top of the 9th. Dodgers closer Jonathan Broxton struggles a bit, and the bases are loaded. There is a conference on the mound, and acting manager Mattingly comes out to the mound. He steps off the mound, thinks “oh, one more thing”, and returns to the mound. Giants manager Bruce Bochy notices this, points it out to the umpire. The umpire concurs. According to the rules, two visits by a manager to the mound means the pitcher must be taken out of the game. The Dodgers are forced to take off their closer, and bring on their struggling-this-year reliever George Sherrill, who is allowed (according to the rules) only eight pitches to warm up.

6) Torres hits his double, and the Giants take the lead. Buster Posey, the Giants top-prospect-turned-hottest-of-rookies, gets an additional RBI and the Giants lead 7-5.

7) The Giants’ usual closer, Brian Wilson has pitched in the previous four games and is unavailable, but Jeremy Affeldt takes over closing duties, and the Giants win it.

See, just another usual day at the park.

Spinning: Different Day, Different Cat

Soccer Quandaries

I listened to my first baseball game following the World Cup, the Giants beating the New York Mets 2-0, Tim Lincecum throwing a complete game shutout. I’m not quite ready to give up soccer for another four years, and for now continue to pay attention to the sport. So far this means a) finishing Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett’s latest novel about the wizards at Unseen University being coerced into fielding a football team against the town folk of Ankh-Morpork, the ending of which bearing more than a slight resemblance to the Spain-Netherlands final b) reading Jonathan Wilson’s recent treatise Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics c) learning that Billy Beane, the much-heralded general manager for the baseball team the Oakland Athletics, has in recent years become a soccer fanatic; indeed some suspect he’s gotten bored with baseball and only cares about soccer these days d) wondering if Billy Beane’s favorite English Premier League team, Tottenham Hotspur, would be a good one for me to follow and maybe adopt (it would not do to become a fan of any of the EPL “Big Four” — that’s like defaulting to being a Yankees fan) But chances for me to watch soccer without broadband or any sort of cable TV are few and far between, so maybe I stick to baseball on the radio…