Here Comes Another Short Week

It is hard to go back to the usual routine after an extra-long weekend, but thankfully I'd already planned for a three-day work week this week, as Mo and I will be retreat-ing Thursday through Sunday. I'm sure it'll be a busy three days, but there's a lot to look forward to at the end of it.

The weekend was mostly relaxing. I'm happy to report that my blood donation was successful (my arms weren't scrutinized at all this time around) and took only about five minutes once I was hooked up. But I ran in the heat that morning and then was on my feet in heels for at while at the wedding that evening, so on Saturday I was wiped out. I cleaned the bathrooms and managed to walk -- slowly -- about four miles and I was done. I am very glad we had nothing planned and could lay low. I took the downtime to separate my fiber for the rest of my sweater spin:

What you see here is the fiber split and arranged for the body (left) and two sleeves (center and right). I've split up the two colorways so that I will end up with three skeins of three-ply yarn that gradually shift from all silver to all burnt orange. The papers underneath are my cheat sheets so that I can cross off each section of each ply as I complete it. You may recall that I did this sort of fade effect with this skein, though as both of those colors were so light and similar, the effect is much more subtle. I didn't get too into the weeds with measuring out the fiber, but I looked at the pattern numbers for the body and the sleeves and calculated how many stitches were in each for the colorwork to see what my proportions were like. Those numbers told me I'd need a little more than half for the body and the rest for the sleeves (which I obviously split in two). I've already started in on the first ply of the body skein, though I haven't gotten very far.

Mainly what I tried to work on over the weekend is my Little Plinth Tee, as ideally I'd like to get that done before we leave for the retreat. The body did move very quickly once I had the right number of stitches, and by yesterday morning, I was ready to start working the neck shaping. Unfortunately, I had just bound off stitches for the center of the neck opening when I realized that somehow or other one of my side markers was misplaced and my stitch count was all off, so I had to frog/tink all the way back to the start of the sleeve increases. So now it looks like this:

It is lucky that this is a small garment (I'm previewing the 6 month size) and I can quickly get back to where I was, but that likely means less time spinning and more time knitting this week. And really that's fine; it's just a matter of focusing my energies. In addition to wanting to finish this up, I want to swatch for my next Rift tee so I can take it with me on the trip.

Another task that got taken care of this weekend was labeling and inventorying all the handspun I am taking to the retreat -- approximately 90 skeins! I do hope that folks will take some home with them because it would be nice to come home with a lot less. There is still quite a lot that I didn't even get out, not to mention the stuff I wanted to keep, and much more fiber still to be spun, so it's clear that I need to make using handspun more of a priority.

In addition to whatever work throws at me this week, I'll be focused on packing, deciding what projects to take, and trying not to think about the fact that I will have to drive the whole way there (the Mister is typically the driver on road trips, but on this one, it has to be me!). I picked up an EZ Pass for my car after seeing that it would save me about half on tolls, and I'll fill up the gas tank before we leave. I am really looking forward to the weekend away with my kid, though -- and as an extra bonus, we are going to be meeting up with Bonny, Vera, and Dee at a coffee shop on Saturday morning, so soon there will be three more people in the fiber blogging world who can confirm I am a real person! While I always maintain that online friends are real friends, it's nice to meet people IRL, too, sometimes.

I hope your week gets off to a good start. Stay hydrated, friends!