July is almost over and I haven't done a "Because I Said It Out Loud" Update in about a million years. The thing is, I just looked at my first post on this blog and realized that I set myself a one year time frame on August 8th of last year to finish up all three of my goals: to get into grad school, get my doula certification, and knit a sweater from scratch. That means I have a two weeks to get that stuff DONE!
Law School: Obviously, I'm in. I have an apartment (that I have never seen before). I am moving down August 14th, moving into my apartment August 15th, orientation starts August 17th (although there are some unofficial activities the 15th/16th). I don't get my class schedule or book list until I get there. This would be scary except that not having my books or classes keeps me from panicking about all the other kids being more prepared than me. I think they do this on purpose. I did get one of the "if you MUST read something law related this summer, read this" books they mentioned but haven't read beyond the chapter on "Managing Stress in Law School." I've decided to "manage stress" by going into denial about becoming a 1L in less than a month. It is working well for me at the moment.
Also, after the Great Computer Fiasco of March 2011, I have another computer. I have had it longer than 16 hours without being mugged. I am trying not to tempt the fates by gloating about this too much.
Doula Certification: I am sooooo close to doula certification! I attended my last birth. I am waiting on evaluations. Assuming they are positive, all I have to do is write some essays and finish up a client resource guide. I am very much NOT going to be done by August 8th. My certifcation packet runs out in October (not August like I had feared), so I have a little extra time. Still hope to get it done before school starts.
Sheep to Sweater: My sweater is almost done.
I have finished the vast majority of the knitting, sewed a couple of bits on the hood and armpits together have blocked it out, and it is currently drying on the floor next to the air conditioner, pretending like it totally makes sense to try to dry a sweater on the most humid day of the year.
Reminder of knitting terminology: blocking is laying your wet sweater out the way it is supposed to look. You flatten out any rolled edges, lay the pockets flat, and pin it out to the right dimensions. If it isn't the right dimensions, this is the point at which you start cussing and either find someone who is the size of the sweater to get a really nice Christmas present (my mom has volunteered if this particular adventure doesn't work out) or start ripping back your nicely made up sweater.
It grew a little during blocking as I hoped it would, so I think it is even going to fit me like it should. I won't really know for sure until it is dry and I can put it on. Then I pick up a button band on the front (right after figuring out just how exactly I am supposed to do that), sew on some buttons, and then rejoice in a new sweater at the hotest time of the year. I think I can finish this in the next two weeks. Easily. Sure...
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Now I am at the point where I have pretty much acheived all my goals for hte year. Sure, I didn't ever actually shear a sheep, my sweater is knit from yarn that is distinctly not something I spun myself, and my doula cert is going to take three weeks to two months longer than I had hoped, but I'm pretty satisfied.
The real question is, do I continue this blog and if so, what new goals should I write about? Are you all going to get sick of listening to me rant about law school? Veer more towards a life blog? More towards all-knitting/crafts, all the time?
This is my "sweater from scratch" even though I didn't actually shear/spin/dye the yarn I am knitting this out of. The pattern is "Grown Up Hoodie" by Kira Dulaney (Rav Link here)
I should have been showing my sweater progress in stages. I showed you the swatches here and one sleeve here.
But then I knit the waist band, the body, the other sleeve, the shoulders and now I am on the hood. And this is what it looks like.
Still a lot of strings attached. And the hood is only partially done so it looks like I have a pin head.
Here it is from the back
See the cool pattern on the back? If you can't, that's because I was supposed to knit the whole thing purl-side-out so you could see the cabling better. But I didn't. Oops.
If you think it looks a little small, you are, regrettably, partially correct. It still needs the rest of the hood and the button band down the length of the whole front on both sides. But yes, it is still about a half inch too tight and an inch and a half shorter than I would really like.
I am going to wash and block in before picking up stitches for the button band to see if that does anything helpful (I think I remember from swatching that it will grow a little bit), but may still unpick the cast on edge to add a couple of inches. And never, ever wear a bra with this sweater so that it will fit across my chest. Because I am damn well going to wear this first-knit sweater.
Saturday I went to the MD Sheep and Wool Festival with Kelsey (thanks for driving!) and Sarah (thanks for coming with even though you don't really know me!). This Festival is apparently the largest of its kind in America.
It was awesome to be surrounded by people of all ages interested in something I often get teased for enjoying so much. I could say things like "this is just my easy bar knitting" and everyone nods, understanding that of course I would take knitting to the bar with me and of course I would want something easy enough to knit while drinking.
I took a lace-knitting class with this woman: Charlene Schurch. I was not super impressed with the class itself (maybe I'm better at this whole knitting thing than I thought), but I did meet some awesome ladies.
At the fair I also saw lots, and lots of other stuff.
There were sheep. Sheep are notoriously hard to photograph.
They wiggle around a lot.
Sheep did not want to get photographed with me either....
Some of them wear leotards. This makes me giggle.
This sheep is getting a once over before going into the judging arena. They get a little trim to even up the fleece and a little vacuum to get the dust off. The metal harness they have her in is the same thing they would use to sheer her.
In the main exhibit hall there were all the fleeces people had brought to sell. They were categorized by coarseness and breed.
There were all kinds of vendors selling everything you could possibly imagine related to sheep and wool: fiber, tools, shepherding materials, books, food, randomness. This vendor sold sparkle. You mix the sparkle in with your spinning.
I walked away from the vendor booths with WAY too much goodness. Got a new spindle, lots of fiber (including this little Easter-egg-colored bump here), some lamb chops (I feel guilty about them, but the farmer convinced me to try them), and a funnel cake!
I'm glad I got the opportunity to go to the largest fiber festival in America!
I haven't done a BISIO (Because I Said It Outloud) Update in a super long time (since February....yikes). So, in the spirit of accountability, here goes:
Grad School: I'm signed up for Emory in the fall. I will be doing first year as a law student. I am quitting my job at DOT at the end of May to bum around (read: volunteer at the birth center full time) this summer. I really need to find somewhere to live in Atlanta, though. I am pretending that having a car isn't actually necessary, contrary to everything I've heard.
Sheep-To-Sweater: I started my sweater!
Or rather, the sleeve of a sweater....
It obviously isn't made with yarn that I spun myself, but I am excited to say that I am in the knitting phase of my project. In a couple of weeks I will be headed out to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival to learn about sheep shearing....I think then I will be able to say that I can do and/or understand each step of the sheep-to-sweater process, even if my final product is not the result of me doing each step myself.
Doula-ing: I explained in this post what I need to do to to get my doula certification. I am currently working on one of the last things I need to do before I write my essays and turn in my certification application: observing a birth education class. I am taking a Bradley Class with nine couples (the teacher and I are the only non-pregnant women in the room). I am doing my best to keep my mouth shut in the class and focus more on learning from the instructor. She is pretty amazing.
Johanna commented on yesterday's post, "Thoughts for what you'll do with the finished products?"
Answer: YES! Look what I made!
You may remember this pattern from my slipper knitting frenzy before the holidays. I seem to get hung up on certain patterns and re-knit them over and over again. My Ravelry project page is a very boring place.
I like these slippers...I like them because they are REALLY fast to knit (I am a slow knitter, so when I say fast, I mean maybe four hours tops). I like them because they are cozy and, in this case, made of an extremely soft, smooth merino wool which makes my feet smile. I only used half of the fat/bulky version of the yarn I showed you yesterday (yea, these use, like, no yarn at all), so be aware that more of these are coming.
I had to do some very tight crochet around the edging to get them to stay on my feet. Crochet doesn't stretch the same was that knitting does so it helps hold the shape. Now they stay on.
You can see that some parts the slippers are kind of hole-y. This would be a result of my spinning, not the knitting (not saying my knitting never has holes in it, just saying that this time, the knitting is not the problem). In fact, the whole right slipper is kind of hole-y because I apparently spun the first half of my yarn WAY thinner than the second half.
Right foot....holes everywhere.
Only a couple of holes on the strap, but a much thicker fabric in general.
The thin yarn meant that the gauge (how tight my stitches are) is way off in the right one. All this means is that I will have to wear them myself instead of giving them away.
They will be my Sunday slippers (because they are hole-y...holy...on Sunday...get it? get it? no? sigh....)
It's the last day of February; it still counts if I do a February BISIO Update on the last day, right?
Grad School: Basically, the big news is that I was accepted at ALL of the programs I applied to and am going to....EMORY for a joint degree in law and public health! What made me turn down Georgetown, you ask? I won the Woodruff Fellowship at the Law School after a harrowing (that's such a lie...it was a lot of fun) three-day interview. The interview consisted of meals with former Fellows, with faculty and staff, and with current students, a tour of the Coca-Cola World Headquarters, a cocktail reception (slash, secret social vetting process to make sure that we wouldn't be painfully awkward representatives of Emory and/or drink too much in public) and an interview with a distinguished panel of professors and Atlanta lawyers.
We toured the Coca-Cola Headquarters because Robert Woodruff was the head of Coke for 20+ years and was a HUGE philanthropist in the Atlanta area. When he died, he left a large gift to Emory, endowing professorships and scholarships; half the buildings on campus are named after him. This picture was taken before they gave us each a bottle of coke to drink as we walked around the building. Tasty, tasty indoctrination...
There were 14 of us; 4 of us ended up winning the full-ride fellowship. I am going to law school for FREE!!! It is still a little hard to believe. I am waiting for someone to jump out of a bush yelling, "haha, psych!" In fact, I have been avoiding bushes all month until I get my official package in the mail.
Sheep to Sweater: I have been failing at knitting lately. I have finished only two projects in two months as spinning, fundraising and trying to finish my library books before they are overdue (failed at that one, too) got in the way...however, I am pleased to announce that I bought a sweater quantity of yarn (it was on sale...I feel more comfortable knowing I am not going to spend a ridiculous amount of money on my first sweater) and am going to make this sweater.
I think it is pretty cute and doesn't look TOO hard....The cabling down the back makes me think it will keep me entertained enough (rather than miles and miles of stockinette) to actually finish the thing.
Doula: Nothing awesome to report this month. I had taken time off to do the Vagina Monologues, but I am planning my trip to Boston this summer for the DONA International Conference. Will get to learn new things, hang out with cool doulas, and visit Boston for the first time as an adult. Excited!!!
March looks (moderately) less hectic. No more traveling until April. No more crazy fundraising. Free time? Probably not as much as I think, but perhaps....
I stand corrected. I stated the other day that "niddy noddy" is the best name for a fiber tool ever. Then lady friend at Porpoise Knits weighed in to tell me that the best word is, in fact, "nostepinde" (or, apparently, "nostepinne" both of which google tries to correct to "goosestepping") Yea, I don't have one of those...but they're kinda hot...
Anyhooo!
Now that I have submitted all my grad school applications (and am no longer afraid of plagiarists stealing my ideas...you know I was first...), I thought I would share with you part of one of my applications.
Yale Law School, in addition to the personal statement, diversity question, resume and other materials that most law school ask for, also requires a special essay that is lovingly known on the web as "the dreaded Yale 250." The prompt is:
Write an essay of not more than 250 words about a subject of your choice. The Admissions Committee looks to the 250-word essay to evaluate an applicant’s writing, reasoning, and editing skills. The subject is not limited; the choice of topic itself may be informative to the readers.
Did you hear that? The choice of topic itself may be informative to the readers....why does that sound so scary to me? I originally joined my law-school-applying compatriots in hating this essay and wrote some horribly boring essay about something incoherent. Then I deleted it and wrote this instead (possibly also horribly boring and incoherent...but it makes me giggle that someone on the Yale Admissions committee got to read about knitting):
I knit my first scarf in fifth grade. From there, I progressed to mittens and blankets. This summer I decided to embark on a more ambitious project: to knit a sweater from scratch. To accomplish this goal, I would need to learn how to shear a sheep, spin the fleece into yarn, dye the yarn into a palatable color, and knit a sweater that I actually could wear.
I have had mixed success. My knitting has gotten progressively better as I have mastered working with multiple colors, casting on and off in different ways, and utilizing various needles. On the other hand, my dyeing skills are abysmal. My attempts at subtle, understated tones more closely resemble failed tie-dye projects from Girl Scout camp. My shearing skills remain untested. Although I recently visited a flock of ewes in my hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, I have yet to work up the nerve to wrestle one of the wriggling ladies into place while using sharp clippers to remove her fleece.
Despite these initial obstacles, I am not worried about failing. I did not know about highway systems before working at the US Department of Transportation. I had never witnessed a birth before becoming a doula. Throughout my life, I have pursued interests that ignite my curiosity and often challenge my abilities. These experiences have given me the confidence to know I can gain the skills to succeed whether I am knitting a sweater from scratch, starting a new job or attending law school
Besides the requisite cheesy ending, I'm not entirely sure what information the admissions committee will get glean from this one....heh, knitting...
Oh man! I made it all the way through December without writing a "Because I Said It Outloud" Update. I feel ashamed. So here it is:
Doula: I am co-coordinating the volunteer doula program at the birth center now with two fantastic women. I helped train eight new volunteers in December and we hope to get a bunch more in January. Sooooo exciting! I was in-charge of creating the January on-call calendar, though...what a stressful, complicated activity. I also attended two births in November, one of which was qualifying towards my certification (only one more to go!!!). The other randomly ended up being in support of the wife of a college friend of mine. That was weird at first but extremely exciting.
Sheep to Sweater: I went to spinning class. Soooo much fun. I need to practice, though, so I can keep up the skills/hopefully improve a little. I learned that my Local Yarn Store (LYS) has roving (prepared fleece) so I at least have a local supplier for basic spinning supplies. Made the (I think, pretty smart) decision to not necessarily clean my own fleece to be used in my sweater yarn. Still deciding whether I should try to spin all the yarn for a sweater or if I am satisfied just knowing that I could.
I've also been doing some seriously awesome knitting (IMHO). I made these Fair Isle Socks, this awesome hat, made some alpaca awesomeness for Devon (OMG Devon, I never took a picture of them!!! Send pictures quick!!), working on my multi-colored mitts still (gosh, don't seem to have a pic of those either....). Not that high-volume when I see it layed out like this, I guess. But I feel good about it.
Grad school: I've officially applied to all the programs that I am going to apply to. That would be joint JD/MPH programs at Emory, Columbia, Minnesota, and Michigan and just law school at Yale, Stanford and Georgetown (gotta reach for the stars, right?). I didn't bother turning in the UCLA application because it was too annoying (I'm ignoring the sneaking suspicion I may have destroyed a beautiful legal career in LA over paperwork issues). Now I have 10-12 weeks of nightmares about my letters of rec not getting to schools in time before I hear back from schools. Also, interviews at Georgetown Law (this week) and the Michigan School of Public Health (early February). Not sure where I want to go, so it would be nice to know where I am accepted so I can go visit a few places. With all the cold weather around here, I am beginning to think I should have chosen some warmer places...
That's what's up. More pictures of things next time
Let's assume I've already found a sheep and sheared it. Let's also assume that the previous assumption was a reasonable one and made sense in Normal People Land.
Assuming I have sheared my sheep, I would have a big (probably pretty dirty) fleece. At my Art League Class, the instructure showed me some of this (really dirty) fleece. It is all matted and gross. That’s because wool comes from sheep. Sheep eat food, and lay in things, and you know, behave like animals. When you shear the wool, it is known as a fleece. A fleece has to be cleaned before you can use it to make yarn.
Most "all-wool" sweaters weigh between about 3/4 lb. and 1.5 lbs., again, depending on the sweater's size and thickness. The most numerous sheep breed in the U.S. is probably the Rambouillet, which typically will yield around 12 to 15 lbs. of "grease" wool (that is, unwashed). After washing the wool, you may have about 5 to 7 lbs. left, of which 4 to 5 lbs. will end up in the yarn for the sweater. For those breeds you can likely get 3 to 4 sweaters--more if they're loosely knit and/or of small size.
Woah, folks. That means that I am going to be washing 7 to 10 pounds of nasty out of this wool before I can do anything else.
According to the folks at Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill you next have to skirt the fleece. Skirting the fleece means removing the wool from the legs and belly that is too full of manure to use. Then you much wash the grease out of the wool. If it is being done commercially, they may use an acid bath to dissolve the vegetable matter and then “pick” the wool by opening the locks and essentially fluffing the wool. If you are hand-preparing the wool, you might skip straight to carding. According to Blackberry Ridge again:
The wool fibers are then put through a series of combing steps called carding. This can be done with small hand cards that look much like brushes you would use on a dog. It can also be done on a larger scale with machine driven drums covered with "card cloth" which combs the wool many times by transfering it back and forth from one drum to the other as it is passed down the series of drums. We have "woolen" cards which produce a wool web with the fibers coming off in random alignment. This is in contrast to "worsted" combing that lines up all the fibers (as you would see in thread).
After carding, I could then use the wool for spinning.
Let me tell you: I had every intention of doing this whole sheep to sweater thing from scratch. But after playing with fleece and a carder (even a drum carder, which is faster than hand-carding), I realize that it would take me an eternity to clean and card enough wool to make a sweater. Sooooo not worth it when I can just head over to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival this spring and score a bag of prepare stuff myself.
My theory: know how something is done, but be smart enough to know when to accept help. I’m accepting help on this one.
Last weekend I did something I have been waiting to do for months now: I learned to spin! If you are one of my friends who ride their bicycle to work on a daily basis (no matter the nasty cold weather out) and rarely play with wool, NO I DID NOT SPEND ALL WEEKEND LEARNING TO RIDE A STATIONARY BIKE!!!
Now that we got that out of the way, yes, I learned to use both a spindle and a spinning wheel to make fiber into yarn. Let me repeat: I can make yarn from scratch!!! How badass is that?
I headed down to The Art League in Alexadria for a two day class they ominously called “Crash Course in Spinning,” (http://www.theartleague.org/). I did manage to figure out the public transportation to get to Virginia, and I managed not to make rude comments to passersby about how I never can figure out why people live in NOVA (I obviously harbor resentment toward this place).
My teacher was a lovely lady known as SpinStick on Ravelry. She knows everything there is to know about spinning and has spun everything there is that could possibly be spun (including hair from all her pets, rayon spider webbing from Halloween and grass clippings, which she said did not work particularly well). I heart people like her, because most people are like “knitting is weird. Why would you want to do that?” She is like “why the hell would knit when you could spend your time on way cooler activities like spinning…duh!!”
As I was the only person in the class (intense, right?) she immediately got me started on the spindle. Spindles come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they basically all work in the same way. They have a weight on them that helps them spin. You hook a piece of fiber to them and then start spinning them in a clockwise fashion. The spinning causes the fiber to twist as you feed the thickness you want through your fingers to make yarn. This makes no sense unless you see it (minute 6 is where she actually starts spinning, but the beginning part is a really good explanation of what I had to learn to be able to do this):
Here’s her Part II if you need more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAVYmG9zeK8&feature=related
Then I learned to spin with the wheel. Spinning wheels come in a variety of styles.
This is the Ashford wheel that I liked the best
I spun on two different spinning wheels, actually just like the two that they use in this video:
Here’s how you actually spin it:
And another cute lady spinning…good background:
Once you have spun on either your spindle or wheel, you have what is called “energized” yarn, meaning that it has a whole bunch of twist. You have to put it in some hot water to let it set the twist and relax a little bit.
You let it hang to dry like this:
Then once it is dried, I had this:
Cool, right? Then I learned how to ply the yarn. Wikipedia tells me that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plying):
In the textile arts, plying is a process used to create a strong, balanced yarn. It is done by taking two or more strands of yarn that each have a twist to them and putting them together. The strands are twisted together, in the opposite direction than that in which they were spun. When just the right amount of twist is added, this creates a balanced yarn, which is a yarn with no tendency to twist upon itself. Almost all store bought yarns are balanced, plied yarns.
The turquoise and the light gray one next to it are plied yarns. The ugly one on the left was the one I did on the spindle. The others were done on the wheel.
Not enough of one yarn to really make anything, but still, I MADE YARN. See why I feel like such a badass?
Awesomeness abounds when you find a link to a Dirty Jobs episode where the lovable Mike Rowe heads to a woolen mill to figure out how fleece is made into yarn. This doesn't seem all that dirty to me, but maybe I have low/high/weird standards.
Heads up: I am headed to The Art League this weekend to learn how to do this, too (in a class called, terrifyingly, The Crash Course to Spinning), but my experience is going to be a lot more frustrating as I will be skipping the machines and doing it by hand. Also, I just checked in with the school and they tell me that I am the only person who signed up for the class and that the teacher is still willing to hold the class....which means I get a two-day private intensive lesson. It thrills me that I will be able to learn my own pace and ask as many questions as I want without annoying the crap out of other people. But it also makes me super sad for this poor lady when she finds out that her only student knows ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about spinning (and is a horrible student...I hate being not-good at things and taking instructions from other people, two skills required for learning...) I promise to report back on that endeavor.
I had a bit of a posting issue last week, and the "Recent Knitting Projects" post looks like it went up on Monday instead of Wednesday. If you missed it, please go back and read it 'cause I made some pretty stuff recently.
Grad School: Folks, this sucks. I mean, really. I have letters of recommendation writers lined up. I have accounts set up with LSAC (the online application center for law schools), SOPHAS (the online application center for schools of public health), and Columbia University (who spitefully refuses to be part of SOPHAS). I have uploaded my resume, begun to enter information is all 12 separate applications I have to fill out (despite the common app that will supposedly make the process easier), and have written a pretty uninspiring personal statement that I now get to rewrite a thousand times. Sigh...
Sheep to Sweater: I am going to Iowa in a week for the annual Smith Family Picnic (more on that later, I promise). Iowa, the land of farms and, in turn, farm animals. I am convinced that I can find a kindly farmer who will let me hang out with their sheep for a while. However, the folks we are staying with informed my dad that they sheared their sheep in July (JULY?!?!?!), and that they probably don't need a new haircut for another year or so. Pft!
Additionally, knitting blogs that normally make me so happy have started to make me feel super insecure. Rationally, I understand that very few people are into knitting as much as I am. In the larger scheme of things, there are probably more blogs and experts on any other topic in the world than there are on knitting. And knitting is a relatively young craft (compared to spinning and weaving that is. Only about 1000 years old), and people are coming up with new ways of doing things all the time. And yet, reading blogs and books and seeing the cool things that people have designed, I feel like everything in the knitting universe has already been said and done and accomplished. Thank goodness I have other skills to fall back on, right?
Doula: One of the coordinators of the volunteer doula program that I am part of is leaving. I am going to step up to help out as part of a three-woman team to keep the program in tip-top shape.
Here is a little first-of-the-month update on where all my goals (doula, sheep-to-sweater, and grad school) stand at the moment.
Doula:
Folks, I have been on-call so many days this past month but haven't been called. I am hoping to remedy this lack of baby-birthing this weekend with 48 hours of on-call awesomeness. We can only hope the midwives want help over LABOR Day weekend (best pun ever).
Sheep-To-Sweater:
Sheep: Friends around the country (we are talking, Iowa, Vermont, South Dakota, Washington, and Virgina) have emailed me to say they are on the hunt for sheep. I was going to go to the VA Fall Fiber Festival this October, but Crafty Bastards is that weekend, too. I might just wait until the MD festival in the spring.
Spinning: I've signed up for a class at the Torpedo Factory/Art League for early December. It is called "Crash Course in Spinning." I hope it isn't actually "Crash and Burn Course in Spinning." I have no idea how to prepare for this one. I can't wait for the materials list, but in the mean time I am just learning about different kinds of wool.
Dyeing: I've learned to dye wool (more on that soon) at my local knitting studio. I have serious doubts about my skill in this area, but I think I am passable. I might host a dye practice party if I can find enough people that care about yarn to come do it with me.
Knitting: This is the area I feel most confident about. I am doing my first "sweater" currently. It's the Microspun Baby Hoodie by Lion Brand. I wanted an easy way to learn about sleeves and button bands and had just enough purple Microspun to do it. I am currently pretending that I swatched ahead of time and that my gauge isn't horribly off. In other words, there better be an abnormally small baby out there that needs/craves a purple hoodie...
Grad School:
Applications come out September 15th. This does not amuse me in the slightest, as it means that I will actually need to fill out said applications. Still aiming for Thanksgiving as my self-imposed deadline. I've been reaching out to people for advice on the MPH portion of the JD/MPHs I will be applying for. I have had both amazing (thanks Stacy, Paula, Ebeth, Addington and others) and ridiculously unhelpful (you shall remain nameless) advice from various sources.
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Basically, progress is being made, and I am not totally wasting all my time knitting sheep or watching NCIS. And we can all be grateful for that.
