Spinning Extravaganza

Hello again. I keep thinking about my poor neglected blog but I just haven't gotten back to it. Handsome hubby was sick with a cold last week and demanded a lot of attention so I didn't get a whole lot of knitting or spinning time. Or time to myself really. When he wasn't home (which he was a lot, he stayed home a couple of days) he was calling me from work to talk about how sick he was. It's so funny how they seem like adults and really, in many ways, they're still very big children.

I did finally manage to finish the first bobbin of my Knitgirllls SAL fiber from Fiber Optic Yarns. It's the Rouge Violet Cerulean gradient in 80% merino 20% silk and while I love it so much, some of those colors seemed to take forever. It took me a long time to spin this bobbin, lots of spinning hours in there, because it spun so fine. The end is left fuzzy on purpose so I can find it again.

It really is lovely and I'm slowly working on the second bobbin but that won't be very interesting, it looks just like the first.

I did take a little bit of a break while spinning the Fiber Optic to turn this:

into this:

It's my Babydoll Southdown from My Little Sheep (I really cannot recommend them enough. A font of information about spinning the yarn, adorable pictures, great, reasonable prices and lovely, lovely stuff!) and I love it so much. It's not super duper soft like Merino and it's an unusual texture but the nature of the fiber, with the crimp going in all directions rather than straight lines, makes it a fun spin and a super bouncy yarn. I purchased it for the Expand Your Horizons Spinalong in the Knitgirllls group and have decided that Expand Your Horizons is Very Dangerous because now I'm daydreaming about a sweater's worth of this lovely fiber. Wouldn't it be beautiful with lots of lovely cables? I pulled the braid apart into 3 pieces (not the long way, the short way) and spun 3 bobbins, then did a traditional 3-ply. The second, smaller skein is what was left on 2 of the bobbins, navajo-plied. I can't decide what this wants to be but I can't seem to bring myself to shove it into the stash, I think it needs to be knit very soon!

I am doing some knitting too. I'm working away on my handspun Spoke Sweater but it really just looks like a bunch of jumbled pieces now. I'm hoping to finish it this week but we'll see how the knitting time goes and whether I run out of yarn. Eeep!