I haven’t done much spinning lately, so after I finished my errands and chores I sat down to do a bit of plying. This here is merino wool and silk, and it’s real purty. Soft, too. I’m getting good yardage out of it, hopefully enough for a scarf.
‘Net-less
Comcast / Xfinity has been out of service in our area for a few days now and the recorded message says to expect 40+ more hours of outage. I’ve got a hinky connection at the moment with a mobile broadband device, but it’s rather like being on dial-up, so I’m keeping my internet forays brief. I do have a smartphone, so I’m not totallly cut off – but watching movies on the wee screen is not much fun. We are so deprived. (or is that depraved?)
In the interim, I’ve been mucking about the house cooking and baking, sweeping and dusting, making soap and spinning. Knit a small project yesterday, a bandana cowl that is soft and scrumptious – it’s mystery yarn from the stash, feels (and acts) like wool and knit up beautifully in warm copper tones.
I bought yarn for a few more projects (and before you give me a bad time about buying yarn, just shut it. I had yarn money tucked away for the Seattle-to-Portland Yarn Train event, but that was cancelled on account of the snowmageddon that rolled through the west coast. They were planned purchases, and there are projects lined up for the new yarn, and I stayed within my budget. So there. *insert raspberry noise here*)
And the spinning – I finished a bobbin of merino wool, 4 ounces to be exact, spun nice and thin. It will be plied with a merino/silk blend that I just started on. The color of this single is somewhere in the mauve family, but with a touch more purple. I still don’t have a real camera, so the phone pic will have to suffice.
There’s a beef stew in the crockpot for dinner, and I am considering doing a bit of quilting (bought a new thimble yesterday, to replace the one that has gone missing – probably stolen by the kitten) while watching Firefly episodes. I may not be able to watch Netflix, but I have Firefly on DVD so all is not lost. I’ve spent a lot of time at home the past week but have not made much of a dent in the housework; I’m starting to think I’m not very fond of housework. Baking, yes – we’ve been enjoying an array of nummies – but the dusting, not so much. Any volunteers?
Brief and random
It’s raining the proverbial cats and dogs out there and it’s a holiday week. Hooray! I’m looking forward to having four days off with very little to do – aside from eating copious amounts of turkey tomorrow and hosting an open house soap sale on Friday. I foresee lots of knitting and movie-watching and maybe a bit of sewing. Oooh, maybe I’ll finish spinning up the wool/mohair I got for my birthday!
In other news: I learned a new word yesterday: spatchcocking. It’s not as naughty as it appears – go ahead and Google it. I’m going to have to give it a try soon.
And: I have to reiterate how great it is to work next to the Pike Place Market. While the throngs of tourists annoy me with their sidewalk-clogging ways, it is awesome to have such ready access to fresh produce, meats, and seafood. Last night I picked up a couple of rainbow trout for dinner and they were mmmmm-delicious with a light breading and pan-fried.
I’ll leave you with this little bit of cuteness:
Sunday spinning
Got most of an 8 oz ball of birthday wool/mohair roving spun up. Should end up with about 300 yards – now to decide what to make! The twist is not set yet, looks like a nice worsted weight. This photo represents about 225 yards of it:
(whoa – sorry for the craptastic iPhone phone… I’ll get a better one after all the yarn is skeined up and set.)
Down time
Once or twice a year I come down with a chest cold that just knocks my feet out from under me – now’s one of those times. My lovely son shared his cold with me and it immediately combined with my seasonal allergies to develop into a rip-roaring good time of phlegm and inflammation in my lungs (lovely, I know). I’ve gone through an entire inhaler, a bottle of extra-strength cough syrup, countless throat lozenges, two boxes of tissues (because my sinuses wanted to play, too), half a box of Mucinex, a handful of allergy tablets, and so many sleepless nights I have lost count. Overall I don’t feel that ill, but at night it’s like a sucker punch as my sinuses fill up and my lungs congest and my throat starts to roar in outrage over the onslaught of phlegm, mucus, and uncontrollable coughing that leaves me exhausted come morning light. Rinse and repeat.
Which brings me to my weekend: a supreme example of laziness brought on by the simple fact that any sort of exertion exacerbates the cough to the point of not being able to breathe. What’s a girl to do?
Knit and read, of course. I read an entire book – The Tale of Halcyon Crane. I also finished spinning my baby camel / merino / silk fiber to come up with three lovely skeins of yarn destined to become mittens (and a hat, if the yardage warrants) for yours truly, while watching countless episodes of Battlestar Galactica:
(picture taken before it’s soak, so the fiber isn’t quite ‘set’ here.)
I finished one baby sweater:
(pattern: Maile)
And made good progress on another:
(pattern: Baby Sweater on Two Needles (though I’m using a circular)
Lots of folks having babies lately. So that was my weekend. Not much ‘fun’ but it was productive.
Spinning a baby camel
Sounds like fun, eh?
Some of the luscious fiber I picked up back in February has been calling to me, so on Sunday I pulled out the baby camel: one lump blended with silk and the other blended with merino wool, each 4 ounces, both in a natural tan color.
(Camel / silk blend)
The plan is to spin each into singles, and then ply them together. The camel/silk is not that easy to work with, so I’m not yet sure how it’s going to turn out… The fiber is very fine, very slippery, and very prone to static. It sticks to everything (except itself) and slides through my fingers like, well, silk. It feels like I’m spinning my cat’s belly fur (which is a dead-ringer for the softest bunny you’ve ever touched). So, the singles are not very consistent but I expect the camel/wool to be easier to handle and am hopeful that plying the two together will disguise my mediocre spinning skills and still yield a yummy yarn that I can turn into some mitts and a cowl for myself. My son says it looks like I’m spinning human hair. I said that would be easier.
(Baby camel blended with merino wool)
Return to spinning
It’s been a few months since I last spun. I can knit on the train and read while I eat lunch, but the spinning wheel needs devoted blocks of time and what with the kitten and summer sports, I just haven’t had time to devote to the fiber until this past weekend.
Here is a quick photo of a half-full bobbin of single ply, which was last night turned into 2-ply. I have 8 ounces of this yummy wine-colored wool and the spun yarn is turning out a light sport weight. Yardage is not yet determined because I have more to spin / wind off. The kitten was immensely curious about the wheel and spent quite a bit of time studying it from all angles (including from Chris’ lap), but in the end decided to leave it alone. At least while I was paying attention.
Speaking of the kitten, she has a new name – Amelia – and is coming up on five months of age. I’ve got her spaying already scheduled for September and she continues to alternately amuse and irritate us. She can be the sweetest little thing ever and a second later morph into a sharp-pointed hellion that shreds plants and brutalizes our other cat. When she’s sleeping, she is just as cute as a button. Here she is, multi-tasking a nap and keeping an eye on me to see if it’s play time yet. (it wasn’t)
(Amelia peeks at me as I disturb her nap time to take her picture.)
Orange crush
I picked up 4 ounces of merino wool / silk (80/20) at Madrona a couple months ago, in a color I never work with: orange. It’s not construction-cone orange, it’s more on the salmon side and if you look closely there are bits of yellow. The overall effect is a cheerful, sunny colorway that was fun to spin. I tried to keep the twist loose and light, since I have a tendency to over-spin.
I ended up with 169 yards of two-ply, heavy worsted / light bulky yarn (I haven’t pulled out the gauge meter yet). It’s thick and squishy, and has just a bit of sheen from the silk. Now I need to decide what to knit with it – I’m thinking a hat, but one with texture. Maybe the Wurm?
Bucket head
Having a big head means finding flattering hats can be challenging. Fortunately, I know how to make stuff. 
I’ve decided that perhaps a bucket hat will fit the bill, and after spinning up that luscious 50/50 bombyx silk / merino that I picked up at Madrona, there just happened to be enough yarn for just such a hat. One of the most satisfying things about spinning is being able to knit with the finished yarn. Here’s how far the first skein got me:
(pattern link on Ravelry: A Better Bucket)
My blue heaven
Why wait? I dove right into my newly-acquired fiber stash and came up with that gorgeous turquoise silk blend from Herndon Farms. It sure spins smoothly; the fiber practically drafts itself. That’s half of my fiber on that bobbin, a whopping 2 ounces of singles - it doesn’t fill the bobbin much, but I have a pretty good twist going on it which should relax out nicely into a bouncy 2-ply (based on my highly accurate scientific testing method of fold-a-bit-in-half-and-see-what-it-looks-like). The silk draws in more firmly than I’m used to, so I’m going a bit slower on the wheel. Now, on to the other half…
