TGIF Indeed!

It's been a week, and I'm quite happy to see Friday come. The Mister was traveling at the beginning of the week, Mo's been at school late every evening for play rehearsal, and I've had an endless parade of meetings -- five of them just yesterday! The other two members of my family both have the sniffles, and we're all tired, so I think we will have a very low-key weekend.

Thankfully all of my meetings yesterday were on Teams or Zoom, so I was able to craft my way through them. I was able to finish plying the singles I spun earlier in the week, and the skein was all dry this morning.

This was April's Southern Cross Fibre club shipment, a colorway called Bali on Merino X Corriedale top. I split the fiber in half lengthwise and then split each half in half again so I had four long, narrow strips. I plied from both ends of the skein with only one mishap: Some of the singles being pulled from the inside got so tangled that I just broke off the problem area and discarded it. I don't think it was more than a couple of yards' worth of singles, so I'm not too concerned about it. The finished yarn did not really bloom at all when I washed it, and it's mostly fingering weight, though there are some spots that are closer to sport and some that are closer to lace. It's not particularly soft and in fact is rather crunchy, but I do like the colors.

Because there were really only three colors in the fiber -- a royal blue, a light blue, and a silvery gray -- there's a mix of solid sections and barber-poled sections in the finished yarn. I don't have anything in particular in mind for this skein, so it'll just get stored away for the time being.

I'm itching to start another skein (particularly as my most recent club shipment just showed up this week), but I'm really trying to focus on my shawl sample. I've just added in the second contrast color, which is ever so slightly darker:

The two most recent contrast stripes are with the second color in the gradient -- see how the pink is just a little more intense? I'm hoping I can really focus on this shawl over the next couple of days and make some considerable progress.

Mo is off from school today (it's the end of the trimester, so it's an in-service day for teachers to wrap up their grading), but she has a work session for her Future City team this morning, so I've got to run shortly to drop her off. The Mister has also decided to work from home. I will be encouraging them both to rest and drink plenty of fluids so we can get these sniffles out of the house. Mo has a long day of play rehearsal tomorrow (the performances are at the end of next week), but we otherwise have nothing planned this weekend, and that's just fine with me!

I hope you have something enjoyable planned for the next couple of days, whether that's going out and doing stuff or just staying in and relaxing!

Weekend Wrap-up

I thought it was going to be a relaxing weekend, but somehow I managed to fill almost every minute of it, so I'm actually looking forward to the relative calm of a working Monday to reset now! Fall arrived in earnest this morning. After we had one last day of warmth and sun on Friday, we woke up on Saturday to downright chilly temps. It made for good running weather for the race first thing Saturday morning, though because I'd promised to stick with Mo for the whole thing and she does not have much experience running, we walked most of it and finished ahead of exactly two people (at least according to the official results). We did sprint the last stretch to the finish line, though, and finished under 40 minutes, which isn't bad for Mo's first time out! We're planning to do some training runs ahead of the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving, but there are many more participants in that race, so I'm pretty confident we'll have a better showing.

Waiting at the start line

On Saturday afternoon, after I'd cleaned bathrooms and done laundry, I sat down at my wheel to ply the singles I finished on Friday. I decided to chain-ply to preserve the brilliant colors, and I'm delighted with the results:

The finished yarn is a light fingering and approximately 420 yards. I wish I could show in a photo how much drape it has and how soft it is! I am tempted to just wear the skein around my neck, but I'm sure it'll find some worth project at some point. This was also my last remaining fiber club shipment from 2022, which means this status photo I took at the beginning of the year can finally be deleted:

The total count for the year is now at 28, and even more impressive is that according to my counter in the sidebar over there -> I've now spun more than 10,000 yards of yarn this year.

My other crafting time this weekend was spent working on two pairs of socks, the colorwork ones I shared last week and a new pair for my sister-in-law (the one on the Mister's side) using yarn that just arrived from the Fibernymph Dye Works Lepidoptera club -- the colorway is Luna Moth.

I'm really enjoying how the colorwork is going so far, even if it means slower progress. As to the new socks, I've only done the picot hem so far; this sister-in-law has fairly wide feet, so to ensure I have enough yarn for the pair, she'll be getting ankle socks.

In not-so-happy news, we've been watching what's happening in Israel with dismay. It has been hard to support Israel in recent years because I do not at all approve of the government or how it has treated the Palestinians, but it's a special place for me and I will always support its right to exist and the right of Israelis to live in peace. While there's a lot of blame to go around, I think everyone can agree that kidnapping civilians, especially women, children, and the elderly, is abhorrent. We do have some distant family there (cousins we've never met but who my aunt has connected with in her genealogy work), and Mo has been in contact with her cousin -- my aunt introduced them over email because they were born the same day. They are far enough away from the conflict that they are safe for the moment, but everyone is terrified. The conflicts in the Middle East go back so far that I doubt we'll ever seen a resolution, and I fear what is happening there will spread to more instances of anti-Semitism here. It's all so heartbreaking, and I'm feeling very much at a loss for what to do. I just wish we lived in a world where people were able to see the humanity in each other more, even and perhaps especially when they have different points of view.

I'm sorry to end this post on such a downer, but such is life! I hope your Monday is the best that it can be. See you back here on Wednesday.

Dispatches from Swiftsburgh

Happy Friday, friends! It's been a long week, and it's going to be a long day, but on the plus side, I don't have to work today. I'm taking one of my two annual personal days (because if I don't use them, they disappear at the end of the fiscal year, which is the end of June). Of course, just my luck, we got an email late yesterday that the office would be closing at 2 this afternoon ahead of the long weekend -- the university is closed on Monday for Juneteenth. This is reminding me of the one time in my employment when the university closed due to snow and I was already on maternity leave!

In any case, I am ready for the long weekend, which is shaping up to be a busy one here. Tonight and tomorrow night, Taylor Swift is performing downtown, and in addition to the city's issuing a proclamation renaming us "Swiftsburgh" today, there is quite a lot of hype. Whether or not you're a Taylor Swift fan, there's no denying the economic impact her tour stop will have on the city -- the estimate I heard was that it was anticipated to bring in $12 million. The Swiftie in my household is very excited to attend her first official concert this evening, and I'm just hoping to be able to stay awake! I think a nap this afternoon will be in order.

Yesterday I realized that we were almost halfway through June and I hadn't had something on the wheel in almost two weeks, which is not acceptable to me if I'm going to continue to use up my fiber stash. So I pulled out this Southern Cross Fibre club shipment from last July, Hens and Chicks on Bond wool, which happened to be inspired by a photo I posted in the SCF Ravelry group:

I split it for a fractal two-ply (lately my favorite thing to do) by dividing it in half lengthwise and then dividing one half in half again. I started the first bobbin and took some progress shots along the way of the different colors, and I put them in a composite:

Meanwhile, after finishing my mother-in-law's socks, I started two other projects. First, I'm knitting up another sample of my Obfuscation cowl using a set of mini skeins from Knit Picks that I'm knitting in rainbow order:

And Mo and I have started a little knitalong together, our very first! We're knitting the Mas Vida Shawl, which is a bit of a stretch for her knitting skills, so we are doing it row by row together (and I did the start for her, which involved Judy's Magic Cast-on and was very fiddly). This is an excellent visual example of how individual gauge can be -- we're both using the same weight of yarn and the same needle size, but obviously one of us is a lot more relaxed:

Mo's shawl (on the left) is being knit with yarn from Ex Libris Fibers that she bought last month. I'm using some deep-stash yarn: Fibernymph Dye Works Harmonia, a superwash merino/cashmere/silk base that Lisa doesn't dye anymore. I don't know exactly how old this yarn is, but it still had her old label design, so it's several years old at least.

Finally, some happy news -- look what arrived in yesterday's mail!

I didn't pay for tracking on the broken pair I sent back to Skacel, so I didn't have any way to know if it had been received until this replacement came. Three cheers for great customer service!

I hope your weekend is full of good things. I'll be back on Monday to report on the concert!

Only a Little FOMO

This weekend spring finally returned to Pittsburgh. After a string of cold and rainy days, the sun came out Saturday morning, making for a thoroughly enjoyable walk and then some time in the garden. Of course, the weather was also beautiful in Maryland for the 50th annual Maryland Sheep and Wool festival. Rainbow and I had briefly talked about going, but given my sister-in-law's due date, we decided to stay home (but we do intend to go next year!). I have not been to MDSW since 2019, and I do miss it. It was the first big fiber festival I ever went to, and a lot of people I know were there. I had to make do with seeing the photos and videos people were posting on Instagram, and in the grand scheme of things, it's probably better for my wallet and the size of my stash that I didn't go!

Instead of enhancing my stash, I spent some of the weekend reducing my stash. I worked on my sister-in-law's Mother's Day socks (which will definitely be finished in time -- I'm just about ready to start the heel of the second sock):

And I spun up a bobbin of singles from my second-oldest Southern Cross Fibre club shipment (Dahlia on Merino/silk from March 2020):

At some point today, I hope to wind these off on my ball winder so I can ply from both ends. It's a good thing I spun these singles so quickly, because I got what those of us in the SCF club refer to as "a pillow" from David on Saturday, containing these beauties:

The blue colorway on the left is the latest club shipment, a Merino/Corriedale cross wool in the colorway Bali. The other two semisolids are South African Superfine wool (so soft!) that were a prize. David has started awarding prizes to two people every month among those who post in a thread in his Ravelry group as a way of encouraging people to share what they're spinning, and in April, I was one of the lucky winners! I was excited to win, although getting three bags of fiber in the mail doesn't really help in my efforts to spin down my SCF stash. I really enjoyed spinning up the latest singles a little thicker than my default, though, so I think I may do several spins like that and get through several bags quickly.

Today it's back to the grind, though I'm hoping work will be less hectic than it was last week. Rainbow's school play (for which she is co-stage manager) is this Wednesday and Thursday, so she'll be at school late for rehearsals today and tomorrow and then late for the performances. I expect that means I'll be dealing with a grumpy for much of the week -- though if I'm honest, that's not that unusual! I hope Monday is kind to you and brings you all the coffee you need to get your week started off well.

TGI(G)F

Thank goodness it's Good Friday! I don't have the day off (though my office is closing early today), but Rainbow does, and it's nice to have her around after being alone all day the past week.

We had two really nice Passover Seders this week, the first at my parents' on Wednesday with all the family and the second last night at my brother and sister-in-law's with their next-door neighbors and my parents. It was unusually warm here on Wednesday (I think we hit a high of 85F), and my parents are temporarily without air conditioning after a careless driver drove into their condensers last fall and destroyed them -- they're scheduled to get the replacements installed next week because who would have thought we'd need AC in the first week of April, when it's not so unusual to get a late snowfall? So we were all a bit warm during dinner, especially when eating maztah ball soup!

My knitting projects are continuing to creep along, but yesterday I had to start a new spinning project because it'd been about three weeks, maybe more, since I last sat at my wheel and my fingers were getting twitchy. Naturally I went for a Southern Cross Fibre club shipment -- this is Low Earth Orbit on Comeback wool from June 2022.

I'm doing a pretty straightforward spin of this fiber. I split it in half lengthwise and am spinning the two strips end to end. I'll chain-ply the singles when they're done.

Tomorrow afternoon, Rainbow and I are going to see Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, so I've been pondering what knitting to take (because we all know I can't sit in a seat for almost three hours with no knitting!). I was considering casting on a new charity hat, but then I remembered that I had started a pair of ankle socks for myself at the beginning of the year that I'd largely forgotten, so they should be perfect. I'll just have to focus on finishing up the heel flap and getting through the heel turn and gusset before then.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Happy Easter if you're celebrating!

Fiber Out, Fiber In

Happy Friday, friends! It's a cold one here -- we aren't even going to break 20F today, and that's not even taking into account the wind chill. I have to make a couple of quick trips out (to pick up some more milk and get Rainbow from school), but otherwise I will be staying inside with lots of wool on me.

Yesterday was a very busy day. I went for a quick run first thing, then went into my office for a team meeting, then went to donate blood, and finally went to drop off an Amazon return before heading home -- I had 18K steps by the time I got home for lunch! On top of all that, I had a board meeting yesterday evening. So today I am hoping for a much quieter day.

While some knitting has been happening this week, it's mainly been about the spinning here lately. On Wednesday afternoon I plied up that quick spin I shared in singles form in my last post. I was too busy yesterday to skein and wash it, so that's on tap for today.

This is the fourth bag of Southern Cross fiber I've spun this year, and that's a good thing, because my January club just arrived!

The colorway is Rainforest, and it's on Bond wool, a breed that is lovely and easy to spin but more hardy than merino.

That's not the only fiber I received in the mail this week, either. In my Sunday Zoom last week, Margene informed me that she'd sent me a box of fiber from her stash, which she is in the process of divesting now that she no longer spins. I would have told her I didn't need any more fiber in my stash if she'd asked, but she knew I would appreciate some special items and only told me they were coming after they were already in the mail!

The three bags in the top row are all (obviously) undyed, but don't let that fool you into thinking they're boring. They are, from left to right, 70/20/10 Cormo/alpaca/bombyx silk, 90/10 Cormo/yearling mohair, and Polwarth. The dyed fiber is pretty special, too: 80/20 Cormo/angora, CVM/alpaca/angora/sparkle (percentages not specified), and 60/30/10 merino/silk/angora. I have a lot of very pleasurable spinning time ahead!

I hope if your area is frigid like mine, you can stay warm and cozy while the cold lasts. Have a great weekend!

Best Friends

It was hard to wake up this morning, as it's Monday and a gloomy, snowy one to boot, but I woke up satisfied with a very relaxing weekend. It actually felt a bit like a long weekend, as Friday was very quiet at work and I was able to get a lot done around the house, including plying an entire skein of handspun:

This is my second finished skein of the year, and it was spun up in less than a week! This is the most recent Southern Cross Fibre club shipment to enter my stash, as it was December's colorway. It's called Best Friends and was inspired by this photo from the movie How to Train Your Dragon:

I spun this one up exactly like the previous one -- end to end, then wound into a center-pull ball and plied from both ends. Apparently I spun this one a bit finer, because I ended up with about 75 more yards (approximately 470 in this skein):

The base on this shipment was grey merino wool, which I think added so much depth to the saturated colors David used. It's not too obvious in the photos, but in real life you can see the subtle shaded effect. The colors were very much in my happy place as far as preferences were concerned, and this skein goes very well with the pale blue I finished last weekend, so I think a striped shawl using the two may be in order.

Let's see how I'm doing in my SCF spin-down project, shall we?

Two of the bags have now been spun, and the next shipment on the wheel is one that was hiding when I took this photo and later found under some project bags. Meanwhile, David has posted themes for February (he's doing a monthly spin-along this year), and they include warm colors and combo spin. So perhaps I will spin up a couple of colorways together for a combo spin and spin up that reddish fiber in the top row to go with the last combo spin I completed (I'd still like to use it for a lightweight sweater for me, but I'd need a bit more yardage if I want it to have long sleeves).

I don't know that I can manage to keep up the pace on the spinning for the entire year, but it's a good start, and if I end the year with fewer bags of fiber than I started with, I'll be happy!

Plying for Days

It's Monday morning and a very cold start to Thanksgiving week! We started off the day with a trip to Rainbow's dentist, so I am playing a bit of catch-up this morning. I've got to get going soon if I'm going to get my walk in before my work meeting at 11, so I'm going to keep this post pretty short and sweet.

We had a pretty relaxing weekend, which was good because it was frigid outside and it was good time to hunker down inside where it was toasty. I spent quite a lot of it plying my combo spin, a task that took longer than expected because it seemed like my bobbins were magically adding more singles when I wasn't looking. In all it took me three days of plying sessions (no, I did not spend all of those three days plying) to fill up two bobbins of yarn.

I started plying using the purple Akerworks bobbin and switched over to the wooden Lendrum bobbin when I thought I'd plied about half of my singles, but when the second bobbin was full, I still had more to go, so I had to rejoin my singles to the end of the plied yarn on the first bobbin to do the rest. In the end, I used pretty much every last bit of singles. When the first bobbin of singles ran out, I wound off the singles from one of the two remaining and made a plying bracelet, and when those ran out, I chain-plied the tiny bit that was left (if you look closely at the bobbin on the left, you'll see that last bit -- it's the solid orange-y bit you can see coming out from under my thumb). It took me a good while to skein up the yarn yesterday afternoon, and then both skeins got a nice soak. The one plus of the temperatures being so low is that the radiators in our house are on high, so the skeins are ever so slightly damp this morning.

This spin used three past club colorways from the Southern Cross Fibre club: Poisoned Apple on Bond from October 2018, Posy on Bond from April 2019, and Blazing Skies on Rambouillet from November 2021. I split each one up into multiple smaller bundles and then split all the bundles into three piles so all three colorways would be evenly distributed over the three bobbins of singles. The final yarn is fingering weight, as planned, and I have approximately 1,180 yards.

I'm delighted with how this yarn came out, but I am ready to spin something that's not a shade of red now! I'm going to take a break from my wheel for a few days, but then I'll be dipping into my Fibernymph Dye Works holiday set, so get ready for some spoilers. In the meantime, I hope you're keeping warm if it's cold where you are, and I hope you have a good start to your week!

Still Getting Caught Up

G'morning, friends. I hope you all had a good weekend. We ended up being busier than I was expecting, but I got everything done that I needed to and had some much-needed down time. One of the things I got done was taking care of the last steps to finish my latest skein of handspun. I am still working on my long-term project to spin my older Southern Cross Fibre club shipments, and this particular skein was spun from what was the oldest shipment I had -- Dot on Bond from October 2017.

I have to admit that the main reason I didn't spin this one for so long is because I didn't love the colorway in fiber form. But as is so often the case with David's colorways, I changed my opinion after I spun it. I simply divided the length of fiber into thirds and spun a traditional three ply. I was planning to do a slighter heavier yarn than usual, but this Bond wanted to be spun fine, so it's a fingering weight.

I was hoping that the tan/light brown would be more distributed, but somehow it ended up getting concentrated primarily in one part of the skein. But that meant that the reds were also concentrated, and that made those reds really intense.

I used up every bit of singles that I spun by making a plying bracelet when the first bobbin ran out and then chain-plying a yard or two when the second one ran out, and I ended up with approximately 426 yards. That would make this yarn pretty much perfect for socks. I do like the colorway much better in yarn form, but it's still not really something I'd pick on my own, so this skein will probably be posted on the Instagram account where I sell my handspun (though if any of you wants first dibs, let me know!).

Here is where things stand on this project now -- this is a photo I took of the remaining SCF club stash in March, I think, so it's missing the three most recent shipments:

I'm not quite keeping up with the influx of new shipments, but I am spinning up older ones! The colorway in the center of the second row (the blue/green) has been sitting next to my wheel waiting to be spun up next, and I also think I'm going to do a combo spin of three red-heavy colorways. We'll see if I ever manage to catch up!

What to Spin Next?

Since I finished my most recent skein of handspun, I've been pondering what should go on the wheel next. I do know that it will be something out of the Southern Cross Fibre club backlog bag, and I was thinking it would make sense to spin up something to go with the most recent skein so that I have enough yardage to make something. I thought I had another colorway that looked similar, but when I pulled it out, it wasn't as I remembered. It might still work, but it also might be awful. For the sake of matching the yarn, I want something that is a wool blended with something shiny, and I came up with two wool/silk options:

On the left is Mending Fences from November 2018. I remembered it being more blue and yellow/gold and less brown and green. On the right is Forest Gathering from May 2019. I will likely end up spinning both, but of the two, which do you think is a better match for the existing skein? (Of course, I ask this knowing full well that often the finished yarn ends up looking much different from the fiber, so I may not be able to know which is the winner until I spin them both and compare the skeins.)

The Return of Spinning Sunday

It's been a long time since I last published a Spinning Sunday post. Do you remember when they were a weekly thing? I've obviously been in some kind of funk with my spinning, because this skein took me a good three months to spin; in the past, I've spun an entire sweater's quantity of yarn in less time than that. I'm not sure what caused it, but I'm trying not to analyze it too much and instead focus on going forward.

This finished skein started with three bags of fiber from the Ross Farm, two faun-colored CVM and one chocolate brown Romney. I weighed all the fiber beforehand and had 114 g of the CVM and 50 g of the Romney (a total of 164 g or about 5.78 oz.), so I knew that if I spun a ply from each back of fiber, the Romney was going to run out before the CVM did and, if I wanted to use up all the singles or as much as I could, I'd have a section of the skein that was CVM only, though the majority of it would be a slightly marled three-ply yarn. If you look closely at the finished yarn, you can see a definite difference in texture, which I attribute to the slightly different characteristics of the two wool breeds -- the CVM having more crimp than the Romney and thus making the yarn that contains both breeds a little bumpy and textured after washing.

All the fiber was roving, meaning it was carded and all the fibers were jumbled, so the surface of the finished yarn is much more uneven than what you might be used to seeing from me. I think part of the reason the spinning took as long as it did is because I was stopping so frequently to pull out VM (the fiber was minimally processed) and neps.

I'd spun this yarn with the intention of using it as the contrast color in the matching Garland and Little Garland (Ravelry links) sweaters I want to knit for me and Rainbow later this year. It's definitely the fingering weight I need, though certainly a bit more thick and thin than the main yarn, and I have more than enough yardage, at approximately 545 yards in this skein. I think it goes really well with the combo spin yarn that will be the main color, too:

I'm determined to keep the spinning going at a more reasonable pace now, and to that end, I started my next project yesterday. This is the oldest Southern Cross Fibre club shipment in my stash, from December 2015, and as predicted, it wants to be spun as very fine singles:

For those of you outside the U.S., that's a dime/10 cent coin, approximately 1.7 cm in diameter.

 

It turns out that rose fiber has a very similar feel to bamboo, tencel, and other faux silks I've spun over the years. It's a bit slippery, but it's nothing I can't handle. I am spinning the fiber from one end to the other and will chain-ply the singles in the end for what I imagine will be a yarn with tons of shine and drape.

At Last

Happy Friday, friends -- we've made it to the end of the week! I normally try to post first thing in the morning, but today I wanted to get my walk in early to avoid the worst of the rain moving through here this morning. I took an umbrella just in case and only needed it for the last mile or so.

Today I have a finished project to share! Though, as the Knitmore Girls would say, it's not finished finished finished.

This is the skein of undyed CVM and Romney from the Ross Farm that I've been working on for far too long -- since mid-February, if you can believe it. I have no idea why it took me so long, especially considering that in the past I have spun a couple of pounds of undyed fiber in far less time, but it really doesn't matter. I finished plying yesterday evening, using up nearly all of my singles. You may remember that I had two bobbins of this faun-colored CVM and one of a darker brown Romney, and I plied all three together, but the Romney (as expected, because I had less of it to begin with) ran out and I made a plying bracelet with the singles on the fuller of the two bobbins remaining to use up the rest, so what you're seeing on the top layer here is all CVM. On my to-do list for this afternoon is skeining and washing this yarn.

Now that this spinning project is done, I need some color! As tempted as I am by my most recent club shipments, I am committed to spinning the older stuff first, so I went into my big bag of Southern Cross Fiber stash and pull out this:

This is, quite literally, the oldest SCF fiber in my stash -- it's Primordial from December 2015, and it's on an 80/20 blend of organic Merino and rose fiber. Mary and I emailed a bit back and forth about the rose fiber earlier in the week, and I realized that what I was telling her about it was really just assumptions on my part, so I decided to do a little research. It turns out my assumptions were correct: Rose fiber for spinning is a cellulose that is made from the stems of rose bushes. It's marketed as a form of vegan silk because it has the same shine (which I think you can see in this photo despite the bad lighting). It's made into fiber in much the same way that things like bamboo and tencel are, and it gives the same sort of pearly shine to the wool it's blended with. I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to spin this other than I know it will want to be spun quite finely because of the blend. I'm leaning toward spinning it end to end and chain-plying to preserve the colors and also make it a more mindless spin, but ideas and opinions are welcome.

Have a great weekend!

Off to a Wet Start

Happy Monday, friends! After a weekend that felt more like July than mid-May, today it is dark and very rainy. We knew that the rain was coming, and that why Rainbow and I spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon planting in the garden. It doesn't look like much yet, but I'm hoping that in a couple of weeks things will be bigger and more colorful.

This is the front yard, where we have a mix of colors of impatiens, and if you look really closely, you might be able to spot two tiny tomato plants and a lavender plant toward the left (you can see a smaller pink hydrangea just behind the row of impatiens -- the lavender is to the left of it and the tomatoes are to the right). You may also notice that around the flowers there's some darker soil. I'm particularly excited about that -- it's compost from my backyard composter! This is the first time I've opened up the sliding door at the bottom of it and pulled out some useful compost, and I'm delighted that after more than a decade of tossing kitchen scraps and yard waste into it, I have something useful! Our soil in the front yard seemed particularly weak, so I was happy to toss some into the planting bed.

In the backyard, we have the herbs -- two basil plants and one each parsley and dill -- surrounded by marigolds. There's still quite a bit of planting space here because we have a bunch of seedlings getting bigger inside: three kids of melons (honeydew, canteloupe, and watermelon), butternut squash, cucumbers, radishes, bell peppers, and sunflowers. I doubt that I'll be successful in getting it all to grow, but I had the seeds and figured it couldn't hurt to try.

I did do some knitting over the weekend (not enough to make progress worthy of a new photo), but my goal for today is to finish spinning this bobbin of singles:

I have maybe and arm's length of fiber left to spin, but it's a slower process because this fiber is actual roving and was minimally processed, so I am pausing frequently to remove VM and nepps. I really want to get this done and plied with the other two bobbins of undyed singles because I am craving some color. These won't be going on the wheel just yet, but look at the two most recent shipments from the Southern Cross Fibre club (which are much prettier when I don't need to use artificial light to snap a photo):

Eventide on Corriedale is on the left and Maple Fantasy on grey Merino is on the right. That grey Merino is really calling my name, but I am committed to spinning older stash first, so these will have to wait. Nevertheless, I am enjoying seeing the colors, especially on this gloomy day.

I hope your week is off to a less-soggy start!

The State of the Spinning Stash, April 2022 Edition

This is a post I'd intended to write a week ago, but obvious it became impossible when I did not get home Sunday evening as planned. The timing is pretty irrelevant, though, which will become clear in a moment. The point of this post to mainly to take a look at how I've been doing in spinning down my fiber stash, specifically from my stash Southern Cross Fibre club shipments. You may remember that doing so was a goal of mine last year, and you might even remember that I took a photo of all my SCF fiber and was tracking which bags I'd spun during the year. That's what I'm doing again this year.

While I didn't spin all of my SCF stash last year, I did make a pretty good dent -- by my count, at least 18 bags of fiber. Some of that was in the stash when I posted that photo and some came into the stash over the course of the year. And of course that's continued to happen this year. Thought I've been making an effort not to go out and buy more yarn and fiber this year, I've continued my membership in the fiber club because it's a small pleasure I can give myself every month, and I think we can all use a little something to look forward to. So here's where things stand at the moment:

These are arranged, left to right and top to bottom, from oldest and newest. The oldest shipment is in the top left-hand corner and is from December 2015. The newest just came in March and is the February 2022 shipment. One more shipment is currently somewhere between Australia and the United States. These are all monthly club shipments with the exception of the two bags at the far right in the top row, which were prizes for spinalongs from years past.

There's a lot of fiber here -- approximately 2,310 g or 81.5 oz./5+ lbs. But the thing about collecting fiber from one dyer is that their color sense comes through even when they're creating new colorways, and I see a lot of groupings that would work for combo spins or even just combining skeins. Like look at this group in the red/purple/brown family:

Or these in the green/blue/purple range:

Or even these colorways that seem to have a lot of colors in common:

I am really excited about all the possibilities for blending and combining, and I'm eager to get back to my wheel. As I did last year, I've made a list of all the shipments in chronological order, and I'm going to be tracking what I spin throughout the rest of the year. I think I'd like to start with some of the older stash because it's been waiting its turn to get on the wheel for a long time -- in part because (at least in the case of the oldest shipment) I felt like I needed to be a better spinner to be worthy of the fiber. I am a better spinner now, I think, but I've also changed my attitude toward using the "good stuff" since then and believe that if we save things for someday, we'll never actually believe we're good enough for them.

I still have some neutral/undyed fiber to finish spinning, but expect to see some of this fiber on the wheel soon -- and be sure to hold me to account!

The State of the Spinning (and the Spinning Stash)

It's been quite a while since I published a Spinning Sunday post; since making the switch to thrice-weekly posts during the week, I've found I've needed the weekend to come up with more content, but seeing as this coming week will include a One Little Word update, I though I could sneak in a little spinning chatter today.

One of my goals from last year was to spin up a lot of my spinning stash, and I did do that. But I also haven't stopped my fiber club, which means there's always a bag of fiber coming in every month. That was part of the impetus for the big combo spin, and I expect that combining multiple colorways for a larger project is going to be more commonplace in my spinning practice. But before I embark on another big spinning project, I thought I should probably finish up the last one. I did finish up all of the main yarn for the matching mom-and-daughter sweaters, but I also wanted to spin for the contrast for the colorwork (as a reminder, the planned patterns are Garland and Little Garland -- both links go to Ravelry). It made sense to me, given how much color went into the combo spin, to spin up a contrast skein in an undyed, natural color. I have a bag of Ross Farm Florida Cracker roving somewhere in my stash that I'd planned to use but could not for the life of me find it, so instead I'm spinning up some smaller amounts from Ross Farm -- two 2 oz. bags of fawn-colored CVM and an almost 2 oz. bag of slightly darker brown Romney. The yarn will be marled but should be pretty subtle. I've started with one of the bags of CVM:

This fiber is true roving, and it's minimally processed, so there's still a fair bit of VM in it. I am pulling out larger nepps and clumps of stuff as I spin, but because it's roving and not combed top, the yarn is naturally going to have a little bit of texture to it, but I think that will only add to the charm.

As for the fiber stash, I just updated the last five months of the Southern Cross Fibre club shipments, all of which are beautiful. Here are the last four from 2021:

Clockwise from top left: Boo! on Comeback Wool, Coastline on Bond, Blazing Skies on Rambouillet, and Plumage on Shetland

The most recent shipment (for January) arrived late last week after the USPS lost track of it in the system. Fortunately, Australia Post was kind enough to send me an email letting me know it had been delivered.

This one is called Amethyst on South African Superfine Merino, so you can imagine how soft it feels. I am very excited about all of these shipments and the gorgeous colors, and I'm hoping knowing that they're all waiting to be spun is good motivation to finish up this last skein for the sweater project!
 

Make Like a Tortoise

It feels a little silly to be putting together a spinning post after a week with very little spinning, but I've been missing my Sunday posts and at least have some photos to share, so Spinning Sunday is happening this week. I've added just a few little fiber bundles to my second bobbin of singles for my combo spin this week; although work wasn't too busy this week, I had a bunch of non-work administrative-type stuff to take care of, and my hands were busy typing much of the time. I am just about halfway through the fiber for this bobbin -- I have my next bundle ready to add and 10 more in the bag.

One of the fun things about this project is that although the bags of fiber I pulled for it are all green to some extent, I am noticing some pretty big differences in the fiber bases and how long it takes me to spin them. The Rambouillet, for instance, can last a good long time because the wool is so fine and springy, whereas the Corriedale goes pretty fast. I'm trying to be better about mixing up the colorways on this bobbin after finding multiple bundles from the same shipment all hanging out in the bottom of the first bag, so that means the bases will be well mixed, too. I'd hoped to have all the singles done by the end of the month, but given that there's only a week of it left, I'll settle for finishing up this bobbin.

In the meantime, my September Southern Cross shipment showed up the day before I left for Rhinebeck, and it looks like it'll be a real treat to spin:

David generally ships his club at the end of the month, which means that those of us outside Australia usually get it the following month. I think he planned for a Halloween-ish colorway for precisely that reason -- the colorway is even called Boo! The base this time is Comeback wool, which I was thrilled to see because it's been several years since he last used it for club. Comeback sheep are distinct to Australia, the result of breeding British long wool sheep and Merinos. The wool itself is soft but doesn't feel particularly delicate like a fine Merino would; there's a bit of yummy toothiness to it. I won't be spinning this fiber until I'm at least done with my combo spin, but I'm already contemplating how I might spin it. Do a random three ply? Pull the shades apart and try to spin it as a gradient? Do a two-ply fractal? The nice thing about waiting a bit to spin it is that other members of the club are likely to spin it first and I can see what they do with it.

It's been a very fall-like weekend here, with lots of gloom and some rain and that damp chill. Rainbow and I got a bit frozen yesterday afternoon at a Girl Scouts gathering at a local Audubon Society nature preserve, so this afternoon we're going to curl up with our crafting to watch some TV and then bake some snickerdoodles. Perhaps later there will be some spinning as well!