still life...

life is mostly still inside la maison gnu. the cats are napping in their favorite spots, my favorite animator has his nose to the proverbial grindstone doing storyboards for an upcoming animated series, and i... well... i'm playing with strings and things.  shocking, i know.

i have a new jumbo flyer upgrade for my spinning wheel (thanks, sweetie!), and i've wasted no time in filling up one huge bobbin after another. i finally got around to plying the Bluefaced Leicester fiber i was spinning at the time of my last post. it's dyed in a colorway i'm calling Old Orchard (named after one of the streets in my neighborhood)...

this is some of the brunette fiber from my 2014 fleeces. here, i layered it with several shades of blue from my box of colorful things, tossed in some bamboo fiber, and added some brightly-colored silk threads (recycled from the weaving of silk cloth for saris). a quick pass through the drum carder resulted in a pretty tweedy effect...

then there's the salt-and-pepper Shetland/BFL (also from the 2014 fleeces) which i blended with (roughly) equal parts Alpaca fiber. i'm torn between dyeing this one either a sapphire(ish)-blue or a copper(ish)-orange, though i am quickly falling in love with this unexciting shade of oatmeal(ish)-beige...

the figurine of the spinner is one of two spinning-related keepsakes gifted to me over the years by the mother of my favorite animator (she's actually the mother of two animators, as both of her boys are crazy in the industry). this one is a flax spinner made from corn-husk, and the other one (not pictured) is a miniature wooded spinning wheel. she brought them with her from Croatia to France (where my favorite animator was born) and, later, to Canada.  the corn-husk figurine was presumed lost for a number of years (it had, in fact,  been "borrowed" by a relative), so it was passed on to me for safe-keeping.

in other news, it's New Year's Day and snowing in Montreal. even more shocking, i know. we may not have had a white Christmas, but we've more than made up for it in the intervening days. i've made zero resolutions for the new year (unless you count the ongoing effort to add a bit of color to my life). i did, however, decide to bow to the absurd suggestion of possibly... maybe... perhaps... challenging myself to a post-a-week year!!! [it was either that or go with my original suggestion of abandoning the blog altogether.] so, stay tuned for a whole lot of pointlessness from this tiny corner of the universe, and have a truly awesome New Year.