Saturday, January 22, 2022

GoldenFleece fibers and how I used them

 I sent away for (to me) luxury fibres from Golden Fleece Studios In Netherlands via their Etsy shop : www.etsy.com/shop/GoldenFleeceStudio.


First I got hand-dyed Merino?Bamboo 60/40:


Love this and lovely to spin.

Spun into a medium weight yarn with two plys. 

This got knitted into the body of a vest with my own sheeps' yarn for the rib (I like the firmness of the coarser diners in ribs):


I have been living in this vest for over a month now, with a long-armed T-shirt underneath.
I has been cod at times and I find only animal fibres really keep me warm (well old bones etc).
However, my poor vest cannot take all of the responsibility so I fancy knitting a second one.

SO, back to the Golden Fleece Studio for more luscious fibres. A necessity makes it so much easier to justify indulging an addiction ;) 0.

This time another blend - 





I got three of them this time.
All spun now and drying (well hopefully the dripping has stopped).



Malachi... drying


DAU fibers dring
Will knit soon I hope.

But in the meantime, the temptress sent me a sample of another blend. Grrr - this has all the colours I love most - so....


Plan to spin this on a drop spindle and ply with some cotton thread.
No rest for the addicted!


Monday, January 10, 2022

Gene Machine doodie

 I (and hubby) joke about "doodies".

Doodie is short for do-di-do-di; do-di-do-di as in signature tune for "The Twilight Zone".

That theme tune implies something creepy and unpredictable - possibly supernatural.

 Not being into "wooh" science and the like, I have, of course, criteria for what constitutes a Doodie.

Example - my first acknowledged Doodie wa as follows:

Alone one evening - family all away, I suddenly got an urge to locate a vinyl record of "Dark Side of The Moon" . Firstly, I knew next to nothing about it, just a vague idea of one of the songs and not even sure it was on that record. Second, I wasn't sure there was such a vinyl in the house nor where my husband might store things. Thirdly -- for what!?? Fourthly, I can count on one hand the number of times I have initiated a musical recording of any kind. 

Anyway,  after a search, I found and played it. It felt good. Big deal.

However a day later there was nothing but stuff about about the album and Pink Floyd on radio, on TV. 

Called this a "doodie". 

Broadly, criteria are: it seems to appear out of nowhere, it is unattached to usual affiliated things, it comes up within a couple of days after entering the noggin unbidden.

Things such as "I was just thinking of you and now you have phoned me" do not count! Loads of readily accessible reasons for such a coincidence. 

There have been several such episodes since. Husbands tries to shoe-horn some of his coincidences into the category but rarely succeeds (ha ha) - mostly just regular coincidences that can be explained as "just thinking of ya" types of coincidences.

Today, I was rummaging in my FO's (Finished Objects) that hang about in trunks and drawers when I fetched out perhaps my biggest Doodie.

In October 2019 I was taken with the idea of knitting a rug based on the relationship between RNA bases and the proteins they represent. A brilliant young woman had made a chart to illustrate this - 



I have her name somewhere and must add it ASAP. 

Anyway I wanted to convert this into a knitted rug with Dark Blue as Guanine; Light Blue as Adenine; Dark Green as Cytocine and Yellow as Uracil then other colours for amino acids.









Not my best work - but when I finished it towards the end of December little did I know just how much talk about RNA was on its way. Yes it violated the time criteria i.e. the chatter on the media about RNA came some time after my initial inkling of making such a thing but still - it fills the creepy criteria to such a degree that I'm allowing it in.