A Whirlwind Weekend

Monday morning has hit me hard this week, so I'm nursing a large cup of coffee as I type this. We had a very fun weekend, but it was not a particularly relaxing one! We had cousins come to visit on their way home to Chicago from vacation in Virginia; Pittsburgh was very conveniently a good halfway point for them to stop for the night, and it was so nice to see them! They, of course, wanted to meet their newest cousin, who seemed a bit overwhelmed by all of the attention:

We also took the opportunity to recreate a photo taken at a family reunion a number of years ago (when my cousin was pregnant with her younger daughter and Mo and her oldest daughter were pretty little):

For the sake of their aging fathers' backs, the girls did not insist on absolute fidelity to the original.

The visit was quick -- they arrived in time for dinner on Friday and left after breakfast on Saturday -- but wonderful. And we know we won't have to wait too long to see them again, as we learned that the next cousin's bat mitzvah (the older cousin of these two girls) will be Memorial Day weekend of 2024.

After they left, I spent much of the day doing laundry and cleaning, and Mo and I also make a trip to Michaels so she could pick up some more kitchen cotton and acrylic yarn for another corner-to-corner crochet blanket (she's a bit obsessed). When I finally sat down for the day, it was to start a new spinning project, as I'd gone about a week without spinning and was getting twitchy about it. Once again I failed to take a photo of the fiber before I started, so I had to steal one from David at Southern Cross Fibre again.

This colorway is called Plumage, and it just screams "peacock feathers" to me. It's on Shetland wool, so fairly toothy and a nice change from the soft stuff I've done recently. I'm spinning a three-ply fingering (or maybe sport; we'll see how it turns out), which I know will be simply shocking to you. This colorway was the club shipment from December 2021 -- and it's the last bag of fiber from 2021 left in my stash! In fact, I'm doing pretty well at spinning down my older club shipments. Here's the photo I took of my SCF stash at the beginning of the year (minus one bag that was hiding, but it's been spun up). The bags with white checks on them have been spun.

Obviously this photo doesn't include any fiber I've received this year, but while I'm not yet current with my club shipments, I am getting closer! I've spun up 20 bags of fiber thus far this year, and I'm on track to spin at least my doubled original goal of 24, so while I may not catch up this year, it's a real possibility in the not-so distant future if I keep up this pace.

Okay, friends, time to slurp down some more coffee and get this day started. Hope it's a good one for you!