I bought Angora fur. Lots and lots of angora fur. White angora fur. I spun it into a laceweight single. I knit it up into about 3/4 of a shrug. It's soft, it's beautiful, it's... about 437 shades darker than my wedding dress, and looks like unbrushed teeth next to it. It won't work.

It's currently in the guest room being punished.

I've started on a pair of socks I'm knitting my aunt.

I want something I've spun and knit for my wedding, but now I don't know what. What can I spin that's going to match the white INSANITY of my wedding dress? I guess I can't really spin anything, because that color white simply does not exist on the back of any animal, so I want to knit something, but I don't want to start over on that shrug with different yarn. I don't really want a shawl, because I find them to be unwieldy. I thought of a veil, but I don't really want a veil either.

I'm sure I'll come up with something, but right now I'm just feeling betrayed by the Angora Shrug.

I guess I'll knit it, then dye it some different color and just have a shrug. Or, actually, I'll make the full on Whisper Cardigan that pattern is supposed to be, and then dye it and have a very light sweater.

The play is this Friday. We're in full on panic mode. I think tonight is my turn to just FLIP OUT. So far I've been very sweet and positive about the whole thing, so we decided that if I'm the one to just spontaneously LOSE IT, it'll carry more weight than if Kevin the Director does it, because he did it last year and they're expecting it from him.

I'm kind of looking forward to my "performance." :)

Picture of the dress

So, I know I'm supposed to keep it a secret, but that's dumb. I'm going to show you a picture of my wedding dress! This is not ME in the dress, of course, this is someone else's picture, but this is the EXACT dress I'm getting.






Isn't it so lovely!!??!?

meanwhile...

I totally want this: http://www.sleeptracker.com/

I HAS WEDDING GOWN!

Well... I've sent $295 to a woman named Casper in Illinois. Hopefully that means that I'll get a wedding gown. The right wedding gown, that's in good condition. Yeah, so we'll see. :) I guess I shouldn't be surprised if she, ahem, disappears with my $295. Right? Get it? Casper??

Yeaaaahh... heh heh. Ooookay.

Hopefully this is not a case of me being too trusting, but rather a case of me being just trusting enough. :) I used Paypal, so that's good. She sounds very down to earth and reasonable. We estimated that shipping would take it to around $295, she said she'd refund any overage, and I said I'd pay the difference if it went over that.

I am excited. :)

confessional

Confession: When it comes to being a musical director for a high school musical, I'm really starting to think I have no idea what I'm doing, and as such, have no business trying to pass myself off as one.

I'm realizing how long it's been since I've had to read music and be good at it, and suddenly I've got these high school kids, some of whom have a hell of a lot more theater experience than I do, and they're all expecting me to... um, well, see that's the problem. I don't really know.

So, I'm making it up as I go along. There's this one great kid who plays piano, and he's playing during rehearsals. The problem is, I'm still in that awkward, beginning, feeling-my-way-around (not literally, that would be felonious), trying to get my footing phase, and the piano player kid has had to miss like, 4 rehearsals for a very worthwhile reason, but that leaves me with kids who need to learn their parts, a libretto and a cd player. So, I've been having them sing their parts along to the CD. Fortunately, in general they are all very cool, forgiving kids, and apparently this is how they did it last year when my (did I mention) ex-boyfriend-who-is-and-always-will-be-an-infinitely-more-knowledgeable-musician-than-I-could-ever-hope-to-be was their teacher, so it's going alright.

I think it's really going to be a matter of just getting through this weird part, and then hitting our stride at some point. They will start to know the songs better, I'll start feeling a little more comfortable and confident, I'll have the piano player kid back, and we'll get into a rhythm wherein the kids start improving and I won't feel like I'm constantly giving them reason to think "Where did they find HER?"

For right now, though, I go to each rehearsal with a little bit of dread that I'm going to make a complete ass of myself. Mixed in there is a bit of excitement, too, though, because through it all it's still really fun to get out of work early and go hang out with cool, intelligent high school kids. Way more fun when you don't have to be one of them.

But I'm ready to hit that stride now. Aaaaany day now.

Not that there's anyone who reads this blog who doesn't know this, but Ken and I took a vacation a few weeks ago to California. We flew into San Francisco, then rented a car and drove down the coast to Los Angeles. On the first day of the drive we stopped on a turnoff at a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

We took pretty pictures of the ocean





Then we took a picture of ourselves



Then Ken got down on one knee and asked me to marry him!

(I said yes)



What? You want to see another picture of the ring? Well... okay.



It honestly took me a few days to get used to the idea that we were engaged- as much as I knew it was going to happen at some point, it threw me head over heals in shock that we actually were. Once we got home, though, and got back into our lives in our house and our routines, once I was able to tear my eyes off my left hand and could get through an hour of work without sneaking another peak at Offbeatbride.com, I settled into the idea and I've been FLIPPING OUT WITH JOY ever since at the notion that I now, officially, get to spend the rest of my life with this awesome, very tall, gorgeous, lovely, sweet, funny, sexy man.

So that's my big news. :)

The right side of 30

Well, it happened.

I'm 30. I will never be in my 20s again.

Though, I have to say, while I was feeling slightly panicked in the days leading up to my birthday, when the day actually hit I not only felt relieved, but actually a little empowered. This is probably due to the fact that I've always been at least 13 years younger than ANYONE in my family, and therefore, even in my late 20's, have never truly been taken seriously (Mom, I'm not talking about you- you have taken me seriously since I could walk and for that I am incredibly grateful), but once I hit 30 I guess I felt a bit more valid. I told that to my friend Betsey when we were at the Paradise for a Sara Bareilles concert the night before and she yelled back "What?!? You feel PHALLIC??!?" So, of course realizing that feeling phallic is probably more awesome than feeling valid, I went with that. But inside I really meant "valid."

So, it turns out I am actually incredibly happy to be 30.

Something besides validity and empowerment that comes with being 30 is apparently a massive and very appreciated increase in knit speed! My mother, god bless her newly fiber-loving soul, bought me the absolute HAPPIEST skein of sock yarn on earth and I started knitting with it on Monday. I finished my first sock FRIDAY MORNING. WHAT?!?



Mom also got me a Spindolyn. It is SO COOL! It's a spindle, but not a DROP spindle. It sits in that base there on the bottom and spins freely, and you draft upwards, then wind it on. It's like learning how to spin all over again, but it's just SO COOL!



Speaking of my mom, she's prolly gonna kill me for this, but these are the absolute most adorable pictures of her I've ever seen. Unfortunately, they were taken by me, so they are incredibly blurry because I have NO talent for photography, but she is just SO EXCITED about the hat and scarf she knit with her own handspun.






I told her she should post that second picture on her blog and she said "Well, but, do you think people will think I actually look like that? Or will it be clear that I'm making a face?" So I just want to make it very clear that she was making a face.


Meanwhile, I've been working for a while on the Socks That Rock kit that I got at Rhinebeck. For some reason, I'm spinning this INCREDIBLY slowly, but the other night I was working on it and realized that what was on the bobbin really kind of looked like a sunrise. I tried to capture it, not sure it worked, but you can kind of see what I'm talking about:



I finished that bobbin last night and instead of starting on the 3rd and final bobbin, I decided to do something totally different, so I whipped out some Spunky Eclectic Superwash Corrie in her "Autumn" colorway, and thought I'd try to spin a thick and thin single, then ply it with thread, something I've always wanted to do. What I discovered, to my absolute SHOCK, was that for the first time ever, I was able to spin a consistent, thick single! So I'm not quite sure how I'll ply this up, but I'm just incredibly AMAZED at this newfound ability, and I'm attributing it entirely to my turning 30.




Something else I've been wanting to try is the Andean plying method. I got this amazing Bosworth spindle for Christmas and immediately started spinning up some Merino/Silk blend that I got from A Touch of Twist at the Gathering. I reached a pretty full cop so I decided to try Rosemaryknits' method of winding the single on a book with a popsicle stick to create a loose enough bracelet to ply from. I was scared, envisioning all sorts of evil tangling happening, but was comforted by her statement that this has worked 100% of the time for her, and I was thrilled with how easy it was!

So first you take the single and you wind it, you wind it. Onto a book with a popsicle stick stuck in it. You have to wind it on in the Andean Plying way, which I could never describe but know how to do (there are a million and one tutorials on the web for this, if you're actually interested.)



Then I took it off the book (a somewhat harrowing process, admittedly)...



...threw it on my wrist, plied it up against itself (not with enough twist, I'm afraid), and voila, my first mini skein:



Easy as peanut butter and jelly. :)


That's all the fibery news that's fit to post, however I will briefly recount the adventures of the vacation Ken and I were so looking forward to.

So the plan was to wake up Monday morning, get to the airport, fly to San Francisco, go on a wine tour, rent a car, explore the California coast on the way down to Los Angeles, stay with my sister for a few days, meet up with some old friends, visit some family, then fly back.

We got as far as waking up Monday morning.

Ken contracted some VIOLENT stomach bug that morning, and instead of going to the airport we canceled our trip and went to the hospital, where the poor guy was forced into a flowery hospital gown and made to lie in a bed at least a foot and a half too short for him, with a pink bucket by his side and an IV in his arm which pumped a ridiculous amount of fluids back into his body. He was given some very powerful drugs and felt a LOT better by the next day, but we were unable to go on our vacation.

We WERE, however, able to reschedule the vacation, exactly the same, but staying at one cheaper hotel and one better hotel, we're getting an extra day in San Francisco and the new dates cut down on our car rental price by about $150. We leave tomorrow morning. So help me god, if anything stands in the way of us and this vacation, I will commit murder. I will. Or at least kick something really hard.

I have not been happy with the precedent set regarding vacations and hospitals, what with our accident last August on the way up to our lake house rental, and now Ken's evil 24 hour belly bug. Though, I will say that I am one to try very hard to look on the bright side and I am grateful for several things. 1. He started feeling sick at 3am, and not 10 am, when we'd been on the plane for an hour. 2. This OBVIOUSLY happened because of some horrible accident that would have occurred had we actually made the trip. I don't know, maybe our car would have gone off a cliff to rest forever by that car Kerouac mentions in Big Sur which is apparently still there, resulting in I don't know how much money lost in paying back the rental company, not to mention insurance rate hikes for bad driving, not to mention a horrible, fiery death.

So now, we're out a few more hundred dollars in cancellation fees, but we're alive and healthy. Hopefully we'll be that way tomorrow on the plane, too. :)