Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Reappearing, just like Magic

Well, hello again. I seem to have disappeared for a week or so there. Oops, I certainly didn't mean to, I can't even use the "being busy" excuse because I wasn't all that busy. I just sort of forgot.
I'll try not to let it happen again. I have been getting things done, although not much on the knitting front. I have knit on lots of things but very little progress has actually been accomplished. Really more than anything I've been spinning. I sometimes just get into that mode. I just want to spin all. the. time. You have of course, seen some of the lovely yarn that's been coming off the wheel lately. Things that I absolutely love, so I think that has encouraged me to keep spinning things, plus, I uploaded all my dyed spinning stash into Ravelry so it made me remember all the great things in that stash.

I finished some yarn. I can't find the picture of the original fiber but here it is on my Ravelry Stash page. I spun some nice, fine singles and navajo-plied it.
Isn't it lovely? I am actually having a hard time not winding this into a ball and casting on with it immediately. I both spun and plied it on my Matchless. I got 472 yards. Like I said, I think it's just lovely. Before washing it seemed a little overplied but when I twacked it a couple of times, it seems to have evened out quite a bit.

Inspired by this yarn, I dug out another lovely braid of Gritty Knits fiber.

This picture is really horrible but I didn't take a better one. It's a lovely bright blue on one end, a combination of pink and brownish in the center and a sort of sea green-blue on the other end. Since the colors travel along the braid and are so different, I thought it would be fun to spin it straight down the braid, navajo ply it and have a lovely almost gradient yarn to knit into a shawlette of some kind. I started spinning it but as I'm spinning it quite fine it's taking forever. Since it's taking so long, I needed something instant gratification (or as close as you can get in spinning)

I grabbed this lovely braid of Cloudlover BFL from my stash

Since I love how the colors look together I fractal spun it. That means I split the braid in half then split one of the halves again so the colors would mix up.

This is a really terrible picture of them during plying. They are moving, that's why it's a bit blurry. I really like how the yarn came out. It's drying right now so I will wait to take a picture of it. I planned to spin a chunky two-ply but really, the fiber drafted so well that I ended up with about 364 yards of sportweight. I'm not sure what it wants to be yet, so it will be marinating in the stash for awhile.

I did acquire something new this weekend too. (In addition to my fiber clubs which both arrived. I won't post pictures yet so I don't spoil surprises but they are up on my stash if you are interested.)
I didn't break the yarn diet, don't worry. I instead won a prize!

This lovely batt is from my friend Lisa's etsy shop (the shop has been on hiatus for awhile but she's wanting to get it up and running again soon so keep checking if you're interested). We had a Lord of the Rings party on Saturday (during which we watched all 3 extended edition Lord of the Rings movies, that was a lot of sitting)
and we had a "costume contest". That's in quotes because really it was Lisa and I that showed up and she was sick so I was the only one in costume. We had a lovely time anyway and had more snacks since there were only the two of us. I got to choose a lovely prize for having a great costume. It's a 2.05 ounce batt. I'm not sure of the exact content, although I think it may contain some silk and it definitely has something sparkly in it. I think the picture shows the colors pretty accurately and I'm in mad, crazy love with it. It too is going to hang out in the stash for awhile though.

Not much else has been going on, just a lot of spinning, some knitting and a fun party. I'll have more to report later this week since I'm going to try getting back in the habit of blogging at least twice each week.

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