Still Weekending

Good morning, friends, and happy Labor Day to those of you in the United States! It's a day off for all of us, but I still got up at my usual time this morning, in part because it's supposed to be HOT later and I want to get my run in before then, but it's also nice to have a little quiet time to myself while everyone else sleeps in.

The weekend has been quite relaxing, and we had a delicious anniversary dinner on Saturday night. We were surprised to see an envelope on our table when we were seated; my parents were apparently quite sneaky and went to the restaurant ahead of time and left us a gift card for our dinner. My mother joked in the card that because Hallmark stops specifying the traditional anniversary gifts every year after 15, she decided that the gift for the 16th anniversary should be dinner! It was such a lovely and unexpected surprise. Yesterday Mo and the Mister went to the pool in the afternoon, so I went for a long walk and then had some quiet time to myself. And today, after I run, Mo and I are headed to play mahjongg with my group, and then we're grilling hot dogs for dinner. I plan on hiding from the heat inside with a book and my wheel.

Speaking of spinning, I set the twist on my most recent skein on Friday morning, and the humidity was low enough at the time that I could put it out on the porch to dry. I ended up with about 435 yards of two-ply fingering to sport.

I spun this as a two-ply fractal, meaning I split the fiber in half lengthwise and then split one of the halves in half again. The idea is that the colors go in the same order in both plies, but they change faster in one ply than the other. There are areas where the colors coincide and areas where there is a lot of barberpoling, giving this a lot of interest. I'm really happy with it. And I've already started on the next spin, using bag of fiber #24!

I know this doesn't look very exciting, but I hope you can see how much depth there is to this gray. The colorway is Maple Fantasy, and it was dyed on grey merino, so the base fiber was already multicolored. This colorway reminds me a lot of a cozy flannel shirt, and it definitely screamed fall to me. I decided to keep things a bit simpler for color handling in this one, so I split the fiber in half lengthwise and am spinning the two halves in order so I can chain-ply the singles and preserve the colors. I'm almost done with the first half. Because when I complete this skein, I'll also have completed my doubled-down goal of spinning up 24 bags of fiber this year and have plenty of time left, I'm going to increase my goal again, this time to spin up the remaining shipments from 2022 (there are five more after this bag, I believe).

I also did a little yarn prep this weekend. I'm anxiously awaiting the start of the Down Cellar Studio Pigskin Party this coming Thursday, and while I can't cast anything on just yet, I can get my yarn ready. I had bought a sweater set from Fibernymph Dye Works a few years ago that I've since realized isn't really in my colors, so I'm using it for other purposes. It contained six skeins of DK, five semisolids in a gradient and one variegated skein. I wound them all up on Saturday.

I plan to use the gradient skeins for a corner-to-corner crochet blanket and the variegated skein for a charity hat (or hats, depending on how far the skein goes). I will likely also use the variegated skein to crochet a swatch and do some math so I can figure out how big I can make my blanket -- I'd like to make it a rectangle rather than a square, which requires a bit more advance planning. I'm going to crochet a small square and weigh it to figure out what total area I can crochet with the amount of yarn I have, and from there I can figure out what dimensions my blanket can be. I still maintain that much of what I learned in math class, despite what my teachers told me, is entirely useless to me in my adult life, but a little basic algebra regularly comes in handy!

I hope if you're off today, you have something fun planned -- and something to keep you cool if it's also going to be hot where you are!