Titles are the hardest part of blogging … other than the actual blogging part, that is

So, I’m sitting here spinning and knitting away, getting close to finishing a few things, and I start to think about what I’m going to say about them on the blog, and then I begin to wonder, you know, when was the last time I blogged?  So I checked.  Oh.  Okay.  I’m behind again.  Some day I’ll be organized enough to actually keep up.  Maybe a New Year’s Resolution?  Nah. :-)

Yummy Falkland from All Spun Up in the catchy colourway name of November/December Spin-a-Long.  This was an easy spin, but it’s hard to capture the colours correctly.  They’re deep purples and dark blues and intense greens, livened up with a bit of gold and yellow and brown. 

I spun up all 8 oz. and ended up with 756 yards, 15 wpi, chain ply.

I love it – deep and dark, with a few highlights.  And even though I took about 100 pictures, those are the only ones that even remotely get the colours right.  I guess I should read the manual for the dang camera some day and figure out what all those other buttons and knobs and switches are for. :-)

And from a totally different colour family:

Wonky!   A quick and easy knit for a thicker yarn, and yes, it really is that bright.  I used the yarn I wrote about here.  It was knit up as a last minute Christmas gift, and the giftee loved it.  Happiness all around.   

And switching gears yet again:

This is  8 oz of merino, Holly Berry colourway, from the CJ Kopec November/December Spin-a-Long.    I really wanted to make a thick and thin art yarn type thing, but my hands didn’t want to cooperate.  I ended up spinning it into two thin plies and then holding the two together as I chain plied.

I quite like the marled tweedy effect, and it’s a good way to bulk up some otherwise thin singles.  I wasted a fair bit of the fibre when I was goofing around with it, but I still ended up with 205 yards, 9 wpi, 6 ply.

There, all caught up, again … at least until tomorrow. :-)  

Round and round

Life continues to drive me round and round, seasonal stuff, work stuff, you know, life.  Gets so you just feel like you’re running around in circles and nothing is really accomplished.

Except for a bit of knitting in the round:

It’s the Fat Cat Knits yarn from the previous post that I spun into a gradient yarn to shift from pale through orange into blue, knit into a möbius scarf/cowl thingamajig.  No pattern, just used Cat Bordhi’s möbius cast-on and carried on knitting.  And then I ripped it apart and doubled the number of stitches, and carried on knitting.  Swatch?  Who needs a swatch when you can just rip out a coupla thousand stitches and start all over again?  Easy to knit, but I found scootching all those stitches around the circular needle and through the three-dimensional warp to be a bit of a pain.  I guess I’m too used to DPNs.

When I got close to the end, I started to realize that I had to, you know, end, somehow, so it wouldn’t roll.  I did some seed stitch.  Moss stitch?  Whatever.  Took it off the needles, and it rolled.  Blocked it, and it rolled.  Steamed the heck out of it, and it stopped rolling.  For a day or two.  And then it rolled.  And I’m going to leave it that way. :-)

I’m quite happy with it, though.  It’s the perfect size.  Wrap it around the neck three times, and it fills in that spot between the collar of your coat and your neck wonderfully. But I won’t make another one.  Unless I forget what a pain this one was.  But it might be nice to have a big, fluffy one.  Hmm.

Fluffy, sparkly Happy Hooves batts from Enchanted Knoll, Good Fortune colourway.  Yumm.  Spun up the singles a couple of months ago.

These batts are about 6 oz, so a little more fibre than usual.  I wound them into a plying ball and then, because I wanted to keep it all in one length, it sat, and sat, and sat, while I waited for my bulky/plying flyer to arrived.  Which it finally did, so I plied.

498 yards, 15 wpi, of squishy green goodness.  I was originally thinking sock yarn, but it might be a bit soft.  Maybe something else, maybe socks. 

I’m not sure I’m totally happy with the plying flyer.  The big bobbins do hold a lot of yarn, but it also makes it harder to treadle with the tension set for a strong wind on.  I’ll continue to play with, but so far, I’m kinda meh about it.