Llama for your Mama

My friend and hairdresser, extraordinary gentleman Patrick Fuller, has a llama ranch in the family. The Northwind Llama Ranch in Sawyer, Michigan, to be exact. The ranch is home to about 49 llamas which are raised for show and high quality fiber!

Patrick's amazing soon-to-be-seven-year-old daughter Olivia owns two llamas and shows one by the name of Bandita at the Berrien County Youth Fair. She won a ridiculous amount of ribbons last year!!

Olivia leading Bandita to the ring at the Berrien County Fair

Olivia and her many, many ribbons!! Such a talented Llama Show-woman!!

The fiber is sent out to a local spot to be combined with sheep's wool and spun into yarn. The sheep's wool helps the llama fiber to retain its shape. It also makes it very soft and lanolin-rich. Llama wool contains no lanolin. The yarn is delicious to work with and fun to wear.

Late last spring, Patrick began promising to give me llama yarn for my birthday, which is July 6. Every time I saw him, he promised llama yarn for my birthday. I even scheduled a hair appointment ON my birthday so he wouldn't have to hunt me down and give me my wool. He forgot it. :( And then he forgot it for the next few hair appointments and social events we both attended. Meantime, he had asked me if, when I EVENTUALLY received the wool, I could make him a hat. Sure, Patrick. Sure I can!

When I went to the salon in February, I spied on Patrick's work station a hank of the most delicious natural fiber I'd ever seen. I said, "Oh, Patrick, is this my birthday present?? Or is it for your freakin' hat?" He assured me that it was my birthday present. I was beyond delighted! The yarn was a gorgeous and rich color of brown, and it felt like heaven when I ran it between my fingers! I decided to make myself a loosely stitched infinity scarf with it.

This pattern is deceptively simple. I stitched it up during a Blackhawks game. The Hawks lost in overtime, but I won this gorgeous scarf!!

In looking at pictures on the Northwinds Facebook page, I've finally figured out why Patrick has a penchant for sweeping my hair up into horns while my haircolor processes. It's so I look like a llama!!

Today is Thursday, which means Knit (and Crochet!!) Night at Squiggly's Yarn Shop, 1604 W. Morse, from 7-11. I hope to see you there! Until then, as always my darlings, Peace, Love and Yarn!!

Yarn Geeks Unite!! Or, My Trip With Dr. Emily to YarnCon

This past weekend marked the sixth annual Chicago YarnCon. I had never heard of YarnCon and was made aware of it by my super-crafty, extra-fabulous friend and summer employer, Angela Allyn. What is YarnCon, you might be asking. Well, I'll tell ya'. Better yet, I'll let the YarnCon website speak for itself.

"YarnCon rocks!

YarnCon is Chicago's homegrown yarn-centric exhibition -- a place to promote, sell, and celebrate the yarny arts. Started in 2007, YarnCon aims to be the premier market for independent producers of yarn, knitted/crocheted objects, fiber for spinning, tools, gadgets, books, patterns, instructions, and gifts related to spinning, knitting, crochet, and weaving."

 

The first person I thought of to accompany me was my very talented and enthusiastic friend, Dr. Emily Roben. I've spoken of Emily  in my blog before. She is a pediatric resident at Lurie Children's Hospital and fellow crocheter. She crocheted an anatomically correct heart for me to give to my mom's heart surgeon after her valve replacement. She's amazing. And I knew that if she was not working grueling hours saving children's lives, she'd totally be up for this kind of yarn adventure. I was right -- she was all about being my partner in crime at YarnCon.

 

The event was held at the Plumbers Union Hall, a block north of Johnny's Ice Arena. I didn't see any plumbers, nor did I see any Chicago Blackhawks. What I did see was yarn -- lots and lots of yarn!!

 

  The last picture here made Emily and me laugh, in that the fiber bundles looked like yarn poops. Sorry -- we both work with children!!

This yarn is from the "Avengers" line and is called "Tough Love". Awesome colors, and the name made me giggle!

There were also very cool display pieces. 

This beauty is Maureen O'Wool. Get it? Merino Wool? Knitters are silly!!

 

This awesome dress is knit with pull tabs from aluminum cans. Perfect for a night on the town!!

 

These are felted flowers. They were meant to be used as scarves, but I think I would use them as curtain tiebacks or to drape over a window or mirror. 

 

 Look at this gorgeous display of pillows! The Love one is made of cashmere. Aaahhh!!!

I bought this necklace. It's hand knit felt that was then embroidered upon. Emily bought one too. They are so cool!!

I had to have this hat from Happy Goat Lucky Ewe Fiber Farm in Michigan!!

I had never seen these yarn bowls and thought they were brilliant! So easy to display on your coffee table until you need to put yarn in to work with! And no more chasing that yarn ball around the room!

Emily suggested I change the name of the Stitch 'n' Bitch to Slots and Holes. Hmmm....

YarnCon was awesome! We had a great time, learned some stuff, and got to talk to a lot of interesting characters. We also got some ideas for techniques and fibers to try. I'm really looking forward to next year's outing.


Tonight is my Slots and Holes -- I mean, Stitch 'n' Bitch -- at the Glenwood, 6962 N. Glenwood, in Rogers Park 7:00-?? Cutest bartenders in the land, y'all!! And until next time, my darlings, peace, love and yarn!!

Squiggly's Yarn Shop and Studio

We have a new yarn shop in Rogers Park, darlings! It's called Squiggly's Yarn Shop and Studio, it's located at 1604 W. Morse, and it's owned by the creative, talented, and gorgeous Rico Blanco.

Squiggly's is a warm, comfortable space with a nice party pit of couches and chairs in the window so you can just bring a project and work on it while you chat with Rico. He's got a nice variety of sensibly-priced yarn in lovely colors. He also can answer all of your knitting and crocheting questions. You'll know you can trust him, as he has "Knit" tattooed under a skull and crossbones on his right arm and "Crochet" tattooed under that same skull and crossbones on his left. If you ask him where he learned to knit and/or crochet, he will deadpan, "In prison." Don't believe that part -- that's just jokes!!

Rico hosts Motorcycle Mondays, which is an adult-themed knitting and crocheting circle, on Monday evenings. You can go to that and then come to mine after. We're cool like that! He also hosts a Knit Night (crocheters are welcome too!) on Thursdays from 7:00-??. That is where I'll be this evening. You should be too. Three doors west of Ashland on the north side of Morse.

Squiggly's Yarn Shop

New things are brewing in my world. More news on Monday. Until then, my darlings, peace love and yarn!!

The Return of the Glenwood Stitch 'n' Bitch

Because of a Monday-heavy performance schedule at the Opera and in preparation for my mom's heart valve replacement surgery, I cancelled the Glenwood Stitch 'n' Bitch for the month of March. And the sad trombones played, "Wee Woo!!"

Tonight, however, is the first Monday in April! The opera season is over, my mother is on the expressway to recovery, and I want to have adult beverages while participating in some fiber arts with my friends. Rico Blanco, who just opened the wonderful Squiggly's Yarn Shop and Studio is going to come by tonight after he closes up shop. He's a really talented needle arts guy, and one of the sweetest tough guys on the planet, and his shop is a very happy place.

My dear friends Robert Chandler and wally andersen will be our bartenders tonight. They're equally scrumptious in their own separate ways. And there are some great $5 wine and double pint beer specials.

My advice to you is to grab some sort of portable craft -- it doesn't have to be yarn-related -- and meet us at the Glenwood, 6962 N. Glenwood Avenue in Rogers Park,  at 7:00 for some creative fun and reasonably priced spirits!!

The picture was taken at the Glenwood. That's my buddy Shayne Halper in a hat that I made -- though not necessarily for him!

So that's all the news for now, darlings! I hope to see you tonight! Until next time, peace, love and yarn!!

Happy Spring!!

Hello, darlings! It's been so long! I've missed you all so very much!! There are two ways to deal with reuniting with loved ones after a long absence. One can either go over each and every detail of each and every experience that one had during the absence, or one can pick up where one left off. I prefer the latter. So let's just top-line a couple of things that are important for you all to know, and then we'll go back to the crochet chat.

I dressed the Rockettes for their Christmas Spectacular in Rosemont, Illinois, for three weeks in December. It was an amazing experience! I've been back at the Lyric since mid-January, and that feels really good. The opera season is almost over, and then I'll teach summer arts camps in Evanston. My work life rocks!!

My mom had an aortic valve replacement two weeks ago. It was planned, it was well-executed, and she's recovering brilliantly. She also has a cow valve in her heart. Awesome!

The gallery owner and I are no longer. That's all I want to say about that.

Now I'm seeing a wonderful man to whom I refer as Habibi, which is Arabic for "my beloved". I learned that in belly dance class. Habibi is an actor who teaches speech and theatre at a high school on the south side of Chicago. He's got a beautiful spirit and he celebrates who I am, which is awesome. He's also really handsome!! Yay, me!!

Okay, that's the most important stuff that's happened in my life in the past few months. Now let's talk about yarn!

My friend Diana Berek posted a picture on my Facebook page of a crocheted knight helmet with a visor that raises and lowers. I had to make one! I realized I could decipher how to make this piece from the picture. I showed the picture to everyone, because it's such a cool piece! My friend Thom Gearig-Howe ordered one, and when my friend Matt Roben saw Thom's, he wanted one too. An aside: Matt Roben has a gigantic head! I had to put 25 extra stitches into each row of the hat to accommodate Matt's big brain. I'm just saying....

Here are some pictures of the adorable and large-brained Mr. Roben in his knight helmet.

The visor is attached with buttons -- I found these incredible brass ones with coats of arms on them at JoAnn Fabrics -- so that it's easy to move it up and down. And how tough does Matt look in this helmet?? I need to make one for Habibi, and then I need to make one for my Etsy page.

The Stitch 'n' Bitch at the Glenwood is going to start back up next Monday, April 1. 7:00-??.  Come join me! It's fun to drink and stitch!!

That's all the news for now, darlings! Don't forget -- peace, love and yarn!!

Matching Yarns -- A Tale of Adventure

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

Or so begins one of my favorite tales of adventure. Lewis Carroll waxed poetic about slaying a beastie -- the Jabberwocky, to be precise. I slayed my own personal Jabberwocky this morning. Yes, I am being overly dramatic. Have you met me?

Last year my great good friend Wally Andersen ordered a hat, a scarf, and a flower pin for his mother for Christmas. I used a beautiful red yarn with a metallic red element in it. Wally loved it. His mom loved it. And then

                                               she lost

                                                             the hat.

So Wally's mom sent the flower pin back to me via Wally, her request being that I make her two hats in the same yarn so that her set would once again be complete and she'd have a backup hat in the event that her hat was misplaced again. Easy, right?

Yarns are, of course, dyed in batches. The dye for these batches is mixed via a recipe, but if you've ever been to a church or school function where all of the desserts are made from the same recipe but by different bakers, you know that not all incarnations of that recipe come out exactly the same. Or even close.This is how my mother became famous for her fudge slices, which have always been far superior to any other baker's rendition of the same recipe, but that's another story for another day. The labels on most skeins of mass produced yarn are imprinted with a dye lot number so the stitcher can purchase multiple skeins from the same batch, thus ensuring that the color matches exactly. Some brands have no dye lot, in some mystical way guaranteeing that any skein one purchases from any batch of this yarn will magically match. But matching dye lots is the most failsafe way of getting the same color.

Yesterday I took a trip to Michael's in Lakeview to match the yarn from Mother Andersen's flower pin. Let's just look at the bigger picture here. I went to a craft store, located in a largely gay neighborhood in the third most populous city in the nation, in early December, to purchase a specific and one-year-old shade of sparkly red yarn. "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe."

Michael's didn't have red yarn in the brand I was looking for. They had black shimmer, magenta shimmer, turquoise shimmer -- no red shimmer. Several other brands had red shimmer yarn, so I checked them all out. This one's too bright. That one's too bluish. The one over there is a garish color of red not even found in nature. I even thought I could mix a flat red with a metallic red of a different brand to achieve my color of choice. To no avail.

I had decided I would make a voyage to the JoAnn Fabrics on Elston Avenue -- or, as I call it, the Disneyland of Yarn -- over the weekend to see if they could bail me out with some closely matching yarn. The only flaw in that plan is that I rely on public transportation, and going from Rogers Park to Elston Avenue via CTA is a one-hour, two-busses-and-a-train investment each way. But I adore Wallace Soren Andersen, so it was an investment that I was willing to make.

And then this morning, I remembered something wonderful. My mother, the one who makes the best fudge slices in the known universe, had taken me to Hobby Lobby in Batavia last month and purchased for me $50 worth of the yarn of my choice. And one of the skeins of the yarn of my choice was... Red. Shimmer. Yarn. And it matches pretty closely to Mrs. Andersen's flower. Pardon my last-minute mixing of tales of adventure, but to quote Dorothy Gale, "There's no place like home."

That's all the news for now. Until next week, Peace, Love and Yarn!

 

Stomach Flu and End Of Days

The Mayans said we have eighteen days left. If they're right, I'm really angry with my body and the flu virus, as I have spent four of my last twenty-one days nursing myself back to health from

The Stomach Flu....

I went on a rock 'n' roll adventure in McHenry, Illinois, where guitarist extraordinaire, Char O'Neill, has her lake house. Last Thursday night, we played an Open Mic at the very awesome Kief's Reef. What a blast! We then proceeded to Mackey's, a bar about a block from Char's, where they also had an Open Mic. Char played, I drank beer. Then we adjourned to her neighbor Tim's house to continue the festivities.

So when I woke up Friday morning, feeling rode hard and put up wet, I assumed it was just a hangover. A hangover I couldn't shake all day. Or the next morning. And then I unswallowed.

Saturday the flu symptoms hit me Saturday like a ton of bricks. No fever (actually my temperature went from 97.5 to 97.2), but hot and cold flashes, headache, nausea, and the like. I took to my bed, where I stayed for the better part of three days. I kept myself hydrated with Gatorade, ginger ale, and popsicles, watched movies, and snuggled with my cats. Roxie and Velma were more than happy to play nursemaids to their ailing mama.

Nurse Roxie

Nurse Velma

I watched lots (and lots and lots) of movies. I slept. A lot.

Yesterday morning I finally felt rather human again. I got up, made some phone calls, and realized that the exertion of getting up and making phone calls had been too much for me. I returned to bed and slept for three more hours.

This time when I awoke, I was ready to go!! I showered, got coffee and sustenance, and got caught up on some work on the computer. I went to the chiropractor who realigned me after three days of being bed-ridden. I went to the market and purchased semi-solid foods upon which to feast. And then I was worn out.

Finally today I feel back to normal. I've actually made it through half of a normal day, and I still feel like I can accomplish things. This is good. But as I said before, if the Mayans were right (no, Mom, I don't think the Mayans were right! I know that Jesus said no one knows when He's coming back!), I'm really upset about all of the time I wasted being flu-ish, because now I'm using up valuable crocheting time playing catch-up!! And you thought I was going to get to the end of this post without having mentioned yarn at all, didn't you?? I've got to get to work -- the holidays are upon us! People need hats, scarves, and fingerless gloves for the End of Days. Or the holidays. Or whatever....

So that's the news for now! As always, my darlings, Peace, Love, and Yarn!