Casting On

I made it to the new month without casting on a new project so I'm very excited to start something new today! I chose this partial skein leftover from a gift knitting project to knit something for myself.

It's a nice, soft blue. Almost a Tiffany blue but muted with speckles in soft brown. As its a smaller skein since I used part of it already, my plan is to knit some shortie socks for the summer.

I'm thinking this is begging to become Rose City Rollers. I have 80 g of yarn remaining which should mean I have 347 yards remaining. That's IF I did the math right and it's entirely possible I did not. But that should mean I have plenty of yarn to knit some shortie socks. 

Here's to hoping that I will get some knitting mojo back with a fun, quick project like this.

Ashburton Beauty

As I've talked about before I had been working on spinning some Merino wool from Gritty Knits called Ashburton. I absolutely loved the colors which remind me of a rich, bold sunset so I handled the fiber in a way to keep those colors as they are, separate and beautiful. 

I spilt it the long way into smaller pieces then individually drafted each of them. I then spun them fine end to end. 

The roving split into pieces. 

On the bobbin.

This bobbin picture is when it was finished. It took a lot of spinning hours to spin it this way. I knew I wanted to chain ply it so I just kept going, spinning fine. 

I let it rest overnight and plied the next day. It's a good thing I was camping and had lots of spinning time because it took about 7 hours to ply!!

That is plied yarn going onto the bobbin! Doesn't it look great?! I love it.

The finished skein is a little overpriced, which is normal for me and I prefer that to under plied so I'm good with it.

I absolutely love the look of it though and the ply-twist did relax a bit in washing.

Here's a look at how fine it really is. 

These skeined pictures are from before washing, I wanted to show pictures of it washed as well but it was washed on Sunday morning and still isn't totally dry! The hazards of the spring rainy season, I guess. It's been so dark anyway that I don't know that I could get it to photograph well anyway. 

It really didn't change much in washing except the ply-twist softening a bit as I said and I'm very happy with the skein which is about 650 yards!! 

I can't wait to knit something amazing with it!

Knit Camp Recap

I'm sorry for the long silence blog-friends. I sort of flamed out on re-entry.

I was camping. Well, it was more like glam-ping. A knitting friend and I headed out to our third round of what we call Knit Camp. We rented a cabin at a Minnesota State Park. It's pretty comfortable actually with electricity and heat. You just have to walk to the bathroom. Which is a vault toilet. (Think mini biff in a solid little shed building.)

Here's a look at the outside of the cabin. We were in Maple at Lake Bemidji State Park. Even though it's a drive to get there we like the quiet atmosphere and being surrounded by the trees. So peaceful. 

Can you see George Fredrick IX there? 

He had a grand old time hanging out with the spider who lived on the porch, Milicent. 

William preferred to hang out with the drum carder though.

That's my friend's lovely Romney going onto the carder. Isn't it gorgeous? It has a lovely sort of shiny quality in real life. Since it was just the two of us this time we had plenty of space in the cabin so we both brought our spinning wheels and got so much done! It's lovely having no interruptions. 

I finally finished the singles of my Ashburton and even plied it but I will save those pictures for spinning Tuesday as it is still waiting for a soak and twack. 

We ate excellent food, relaxed and had a grand old time. We even slept really well thanks to the memory foam mattress pads we ordered and brought (the provided beds are a little hard for our taste).

We even had our Camp Knit-Til-U-Drop sign in our window. I'm not sure what the neighboring cabin thought!
Of course all too soon it was time to pack up and leave.

The cabin always looks sort of sad when it's cleaned up and we are leaving.
Despite all the relaxation and the great sleep, it was somehow still hard to come back to real life and get back into my usual routine. I was exhausted Monday, Tuesday was struggling with some anxiety which wore me out all over again and I'm finally starting to feel like myself again. 

I definitely recommend camping with knitting friend though. It was a blast as usual. 

Ashburton on the Wheel

I feel like the entire month of February got away from me. I was so sleep-deprived and exhausted that I just couldn't form coherent sentences for writing blog posts. With the return of some more spring-like weather and sleep I am feeling a little better though and I'm ready to dive back into blogging! 

So, today it's all about spinning. It is Tuesday after all.

After a couple of disappointing spins I decided to go for something beautiful that would make me happy. I chose this.

It's Gritty Knits Merino in Ashburton. I absolutely love all the colors so I wanted to keep them somewhat separated, although this would make an absolutely beautiful barber pole yarn as well. 

As such I split the braid in several pieces the long way and wound them into balls. Here are a few of them. 

Then, when I'm getting ready to spin one of them, I draft it out until it's super fine and thin like this.

See how much smaller the strand is? I'm spinning it fine and plan to chain-ply so I can keep the colors as they are.

I'm not even halfway done with the spinning but it's beautiful so far and I should get a nice chain-plied fingering weight yarn. We got a different couch last summer and I'm finding it harder to get comfortable to spin so I haven't been spinning as much as I used to but I really miss it so I want to make it more of a priority from now on. I would like to finish the spinning on this at least, if not the plying, by the end of the month.