New Banner for Butternut Woolens

I realized at 2 hours to midnight that the online store wouldn't be able to open as I wanted it to today. Sorry about that. I hate missing deadlines, especially ones I set myself.

There's a bit of code that the shopping cart needs and that the merchant services provider could provide in a simple and clear way, except they have chosen to bury this bit of code deep in the bowels of Geekdom. There are no signs to this place, although they are happy enough to tell you about it if you call, which I didn't think of yesterday. Instead I emailed a guy in England, but he was asleep and by the time he woke up and shaved, I was asleep. He told me what to look for, I called the merchant services provider this morning and spoke the magic word and they told me where to go to find the bit of code that would make everything OK. I sent it straight away to the guy in England, but I haven't heard back from him. He's probably asleep again.

So there you have it, teacher. My excuse. Some guy in England is asleep and THAT is why I don't have my homework finished.

While all that was going on, though, I somehow managed to create this banner.

See, it has words on it! It has taken me 5 years to make this. As soon as it appeared, I wrote down everything I did, a great long list, in the hopes I can do it again and it will take less than 5 years. We will see.

Online Store Opening Soon, Maybe Today. Depends...

if the gods of shipping will allow me to connect to UPS, USPS and others, AND if the mysterious forces of quantum physics will allow electronic particles to move as particles OR as waves, AND if Mercury is not in retrograde because that will f$%^ everything up, THEN, the Butternut Woolens On-line Yarn Store will open and pieces of the Amazing Wall O' Wool will fly.

Also, we're having pork for dinner.

Stay tuned.

It's All Good at the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival

After the Wall O' Wool was loaded and before the dishes were done, I left for Oregon.A far drive along the Clark's Fork of the Columbia. (Don't bother to embiggen-you'll get only sky).

Eventually I made it to Idaho, then apparently, I was either asleep or apathetic in Washington and northern Oregon because I have no pictures.

Friends in Forest Grove plied me with dinner and the best home brewed beer I've ever tasted, a homegrown, vine ripened, perfect watermelon and an evening of story telling and laughter.

Here from the Southern Oregon Fiber Guild are Karen, Cindie, Mary, and Pat. We ate at a sushi restaurant where little plates moved by on a conveyor belt. I love interactive food. The next evening we ate at a tiny Thai restaurant and celebrated Pat's birthday. Being in a singing mood, the group went on to sing "Ring of Fiber" with apologies to June Carter and Johnny Cash..."I fell in to a burning ring of fiber..."

Ahem...

Here are Judy and Iand Kat and I at the festival.

I came home with some goodies. Margie dyed this gorgeous merino/angora blend as batts, then stripped it into roving. I MADE her hand it over. I'm going to blend it with some of my gray angora and make a dress for myself. Brenda gifted me with some natural colored cotswold roving from her sheep which may become chair pads since I'm tired of freezing my tush while eating at the dining room table.

I miss all of my Oregon friends. If you come to visit, bring lots of warm wool clothes and watermelon.

OFFF and the Wall O' Wool

Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival is this weekend, September 26 & 27. I'll be there with the amazing Wall O' Wool. Stop by and say hi!

Boy B working on the buildin'. The Wall O' Wool is causing the townspeople to almost get into wrecks. Boy B reports he saw a guy in a pickup drive past then backup to get a better look. I saw a gal on a bicycle almost fall over. Best disperse it before someone gets hurt.

Heather Hoodie Vest Finished and a New Way of Thinking About My Mistakes

Name:Heather Hoodie Vest by Debbie O'Neil published in the current Fall Knitscene

Yarn:Butternut Woolens' Homegrown in the newly renamed Many Glacier colorway. Available soon from this website for under $12.

Amount: 5 skeins for the 41" size, about 1,100 yds.

Needle: Size 9

This was a great knit for me to do, I learned how to read a simple cable chart, deal with the agony of tinking and re-knitting an entire piece, and finesse buttonholes. I used this buttonhole tutorial.

The realization that I had a very mis-knit back and the agonizing decision to throw out all that work and start over was particularly difficult. Surprising because I do this sort of thing all the time. Isn't that what housework is after all? Redoing the same tasks over and over and over? I also throw out mis-dyed skeins all the time, too, and it doesn't bother me as much as this did. I think the real problem was when I saw how wrong my knitting was I also realized how wrong for me my sweetheart was, too. The decision to reknit also came with the decision to set him free, turn him back into the wild and gently set him back on the path of his true journey.

One thing no one told me about divorce is how disorienting life is going to be and how long that disoriented feeling is going to last. Long after the shock, the anger, the losses rolling in one after the other, and grief that seems unending, after all this, there is still a more subtle interior process of righting oneself on the sea of the new life. My divorce has been final for 5 months and I feel like I'm just at the beginning of what I'm calling "the post-divorce phase".

I'm a smart person and I knew that things would be rocky for awhile, but I thought if I just remained concentrated and focused, the after effects of the divorce could be minimized, would in fact, be minimized. I tried to think myself through this post-divorce time, but it's not working. This phase is not something you 'understand' and get through with determination, it's a process you have to feel your way blindly through and that takes time and it's going to be messy and result in a lot of mistakes, some of them really painful mistakes, some of them embarrassing in the light of logic and reasoning, some of them obvious to the people around you. Your friends, family, and colleauges at work may think you've lost your mind. Mine did.

But I think there's no other way. I'm convinced the only guides I can really rely on are my own feelings and intuition, subtle, and for the most part, unexplored. There was a writer who compared the process of writing a long book with that of driving in the dark, "You don't need to know what's up ahead, you only need to see what's in the headlights."

I'm trying to make decisions now not only with my logical mind, but with my heart, too. I've discovered in order to do this I need a lot more time than usual. When people ask me for a decision, I say I'll need to think about it for awhile. Actually, I'm not really thinking, I'm trying to discern what my feelings are about it. Already the new technique is helping. But that's another story for another post.