Half and Half

This weekend was a mixed bag. I told Mo that it was a good thing we had a fiber festival to go to on Saturday because the weather was just miserable -- it poured for most of the day. That made for pretty awful driving, but I had company, so it wasn't so bad. And the festival, though small, was really nice. We both came home with some nice stuff:

Let me preface this by saying that I did not have plans to buy anything, but I also was not forbidding myself from making any purchases. Mo wanted to buy some soap for a teacher who is leaving her school at the end of the year and also had her eye on some sock yarn. We both came home with a bit more than that. My purchases are on the left. I could not resist the set of four skeins of Fibernymph Dye Works fingering in the bag -- they are Lisa's Ridgetop base, a custom-milled blend, that's now discontinued. I've knit two sweaters from it and really like it, so I figured these would not go to waste. I'm thinking a striped sweater. Mo picked out two colorways from Lisa's new Signature Series: Brights on Bedazzled (her sparkly base) and Neutrals on Mountain Tweed BFL. She wants to learn to knit socks this summer, so these are good motivation! We planned to buy soap from Rebecca at Dusty Tree and picked out a bar for Mo's teacher plus three others to come home with us. She also had some special mystery bags in her booth, each containing a skein of yarn, a soap sliver, a sticker, and a stitch marker for $15, so we picked out two. I ended up with the peachy skein to the left, and Mo opened the dusty pink/gray on the left of her four skeins. At Ex Libris Fibers, Mo selected another dusty pink with gray speckles (yes, that's totally her color of the moment), and we each picked out a sticker. Mine is the one that looks like a tombstone and says "Bury me in yarn and books"; Mo's says "Overwoolmed." Finally, she found an adorable project bag from June Pryce Fiber Arts. There's a large reversible bag with a square base plus a smaller zippered bag. I think we did pretty well for being there for maybe an hour!

I did not get a ton of knitting done over the weekend, but I did finish up the Newborn Vertebrae sweater and blocked it on Friday, and today it's all packaged up and ready to go in the mail.

I didn't purposefully try to match the sleeves, but it somehow worked out that they looked more or less the same, and that kind of serendipity always makes me happy.

Most of my crafting time over the weekend was spent plying my latest handspun. I still have to measure it to get final yardage and photograph the finished skein, but I'm so happy with how it turned out. Here's a preview of it on the wheel just after I finished:

Yesterday's big activity was planting more of the garden. I picked up our plants in the morning and Mo and I put them in after lunch. None of the flowers had actual blooms on them, so it doesn't look too exciting at the moment. I'm hoping we don't have to wait too long for some color!

This is the smaller and shadier side of the yard. I put the hostas in last weekend, and we added the flowers (they're dahlias, supposedly -- hard to tell without any flowers!).

On the more exciting side of the yard, we have more dahlias in the line next to the grass. There's a small patch of coleus in front of the Japanese maple, and in front of the hydrangeas, there's a bunch of salvia. If you look closely (and click on the photo to embiggen), you'll see my new planter with my tomatoes. There will be more vegetables going in soon; I've got radish, beet, bell pepper, zucchini, cantaloupe, and butternut squash seedlings in the house (though not all have sprouted).

Today I'm hoping for a quiet day at work, especially because I have a four-hour Zoom workshop for tomorrow (thank goodness I can knit my way through it!). Here's hoping you have a calm start to your week as well!