Spinning Uncensored

Kitchen before:

Kitchen after:

 

Need I say anything more?

Dearest family members,

Often we see news articles, blog posts, photographs, recipes, etc. and we really wish that there was an easier way than copying and pasting the link into an email, then creating a list of all the family members who should see this link. There is an easier way! There are two!

One is RSS love. This technically means Really Simple Syndication and if you want the easy explanation see this video on RSS by CommonCraft. I have 2 knitting blogs, 3 recipe blogs, 3 news sites, 5 fashion and design blogs and many comics and comic photo sites that I follow religiously. But I seriously don’t like trying to find the URL every time I switch computers and there are so many too. So, I have a Google gmail account. And with this account I also have Google Reader. I promote this particular reader because I, Jake, and all of my friends also use it.

In the reader I have multiple subscriptions to sites. New posts or articles are automatically updated. On the left navigational menu is a listing of all of my subscriptions and I’ve arranged them by category. There is a number by each subscription and this tells me how many new posts there are that I haven’t read yet. I can also see how many posts my friends have sent me. There are three from Mathew that I haven’t read yet.

To see a list of posts that I’ve shared without creating a Google account, go here.

Now your asking: this is a lot of stuff! When am I ever going to have time to read all of that? The answer is, never. You will never have time, but you will have the time and inclination to scan. There are things I never look at until I’m in the right mood. There are posts that are boring and posts that are interesting. You’ll scan through the boring and stop on the interesting. And instead of Google-ing the site every time you want to visit, then waiting for the page to load, you can quickly browse your favorite blog (which is mine of course!) on the reader and move on.

But the best bit is the share feature. Since Jake and I are in the middle of domesticating our loft, I am avidly following ApartmentTherapy SF. When I see a post on a good furniture thrift shop, or an interesting design idea, I can share it with him. But it’s also shared with my friends who are also interested in design, be it architecture, interior, or art. And the latest feature includes the ability to add your comments to the post you are sharing. So now we are all keeping track of our favorite blogs and those vary from person to person with some overlap. We pick out the good stuff and pass that around.

But honestly, the best way and the only way to really realize the full potential of RSS and readers is to actually use them.

There is a second way we are all sharing information and that is through Del.icio.us. This site is about social bookmarking. For a quick and dirty explaination, see Common Craft again. Jake sees a do-it-yourself tutorial on boat repair and thinks, “I want to look at that again later, when I own my own boat. But I also think that my dad will really get a kick out of what this guy is saying. What a nut this guy is!” (Jake doesn’t talk that way.) Now, Jake can bookmark this site the old way in his burgeoning browser bookmarks menu (which can’t accomodate 356 and counting bookmarks) and then send his dad an email. Or he can post the site to Del.icio.us and tag it with keywords and send it to his dad at the same time. If he does the latter, he can also search for this tutorial under “boat,” “tutorial,” or “repair.” Since he is a good researcher, there will be five other really good sites with the same categories. So he can pull those up too. Jake’s dad can visit Jake’s account and also find out what Jake has found and save it for himself and share it with a friend he met recently at the boat yard. I do this with recipes. And I can bookmark as much as I wish without concerning myself with the size of my bookmark list or organizing it into meaningful folders.
Take a look at my account.

By looking at even this brief display of my page, you can see how many things I’ve bookmarked (272 items), what my recent bookmarks were and how I tagged them, and you can also get a sense of what my interests are by looking at my tag cloud. This is that block-y jumble of words on the right side of the screen and they are organized into broad categories of my choosing. Food and cooking are my biggest section right now. But the size of those words (tags) also say something; they are the words I have used the most to describe those sites I am interested in.

So now when I see that funny YouTube video of the cats on a treadmill, I can save if for myself to view again and at the same time share it with you. I can also send it to someone else at a later date, along with another great treadmill music video. The latter one, incidentally, is one of my favorite videos.

So now you ask: your are sharing all of these links with me on your blog, so why should I bother getting a Del.icio.us account to keep up with your interests when I can just look at your blog? Answer: it takes some thought and work into composing a blog post full of links. and I’m lazy. I’m tagging and bookmarking way more than I am blogging. there are also things that I only want to share with certain people, not the whole world. Plus you can’t share with me!!! I want to know what you’re tagging!

Okay, I’ve gotten the message out. and if you are a-feared, setting up an account for either site is a cinch and requires no special knowledge. And until you do, I can’t share with you this amazing post containing examples of re-purposed objects. No link for you!

Blog update: I am hoping to upgrade this baby to the next version of Word-Press and include such features as tagging, and tag clouds and video embedding. Now to work on my sweetest, most hapless expression for Jake and maybe I can convince him to do the fiddly bits.

This is the day after all of my final papers were due and turned in. I’m still recovering I think. Jake made dinner because I was too grumpy to even step into the kitchen (as much as one can step in to our kitchen). and it was an excellent dinner btw.

Yesterday at 11:38am I submitted my two papers, a 20 pager and an 8 pager, and walked away in a daze. We went to Bakesale Betty’s as a treat and once home again I passed out for two hours, got up, had a cup of coffee and went for a bike ride with Jake.

Enough of that. I have pictures to share that are the inspiration of this blog in the first place and where the name came from: spinning. I found a lovely spinning wheel for $75 at a garage sale a few weekends ago. It came with carders, a Flying Jenny (I believe that’s the correct name), and bags of filthy wool.

Within an hour of bringing it home, Jake and I had it set up and I was spinning away. Very badly at first but quick tutorials on the web brought back the mechanical memory of spinning by drop spindle and applying that to the wheel. My first skeins are pretty ugly. Fuzzy, not enough twist and the wool is kind of dull brown. So I dug out the mohair a friend brought me back from Sweden and spun these up:

They are kind of ropey, but very soft. In the meantime, I washed up some of the wool that came with the wheel. Gross. But after a while I got used to the smell and the sticky filth. Per Sally’s (J’s mom) instructions, I put on my rubber gloves, turned on the hot water tap, poured in detergent and started agitating. This really went against the knitter’s grain, that if you didn’t want your knew wooly scarf to felt, you didn’t put it in super hot soapy water and agitate it. Well, true to Sally’s word, there was no felting and it helped get the gunk out.

And then I started carding the stuff. I have no experience carding, so it was back to the web. But in the tutorial the lady was using Angora!? which was already fluffy and straight. This was misleading as her fluff didn’t need carding. I start carding my tangled mass of unappealing dreads. Okay, #1: my carders are in bad shape. Their teeth are bent, the leather they are attached to is coming up, etc. #2. I’ve never done this before and my wool is nothing like her lovely fluff. It’s nasty. She says to pass the top carder over the bottom about four times, or until all of the fiber has been transfered from the bottom carder to the top. My fiber demanded many many passes to dislodge the dirt and de-tangle the knots. And even then, it wasn’t hopping from one carder to the next. But that’s okay. I can live with that. And what I managed to get was actually pretty spinnable. Not as nice as the mohair, but not too bad.

Its the brown non-descript ball in the picture. It’s actually pretty tweedy and soft. And pairing it with the white I’m making a cap:

which is more of a beret with a brim. Loverly. This is the next stuff I’m working on:

and lastly, this is what is left of the last person’s yarn on the spool

I had to cut it off with an exact-o knife because it was so greasy and there was so much of it that I couldn’t bring myself to spend time unwinding it. This is why you wash your wool before spinning. There were three spools like this that sat around from the 80’s collecting dust. And the person told me that the wool might need some oiling?!?!?! before spinning. whooooo. kay. Who was your spinning instructor again?

So, where did I find time for spinning when I was supposed to be doing homework you ask? Well, that’s a very good and legitimate question. Since forced thinking and writing at my laptop for hours was mandetory, I occasionally, like every couple of hours, got up and did some spinning, or wool washing. This cleared my head and kept the brain from going completely mushy. Then I would just go back to writing.

But I noticed a funny thing about this process, on the one side my cerebelum is in overdrive, thinking, researching and arguing about web 2.0, folksonomies and the future of information organization and retrieval. Very techie. Most people outside of my job and marriage have no idea what the hell I’m talking about. I’ve tried to explain, and usually I get a patient, slightly puzzled look in response. This used to be my look! You know, the one where the other person is talking on a completely different plane than you are and while you are sure that it must be interesting if only you understood, or even cared, you still haven’t an inkling of what they are saying. And being too polite, you try to look interested and absorb what they say for a later date. Yup.

And then on the other side, I’m not using my brain much at all but using my hands and senses. It’s very soothing, meditative and it pulls me way way back to a time before there were even steam engines and mechanized spinning. But then I go and post all of this on my blog and start talking in strange lingo: carding, flying jenny, twist, skein. Someone very techie is nodding politely. But I blogged about it, so that meshes the two sides together very nicely. Now to go tag this on Del.icio.us.

WHy am I writing so much? Because I’m still in the groove, that’s why.

Signing off: Wendy of the lost boys. NOT