Back on the Bandwagon

In typical fashion, I missed the boat on one of those patterns. You know the patterns I'm talking about -- everywhere you look, it seems people are knitting them. In this case, I'm talking about Ishbel. I bought the booklet containing the pattern a couple of months ago, but I couldn't decide on what yarn to use. Finally, I remembered that I had a really pretty skein in my stash that hadn't been touched since I'd purchased it sometime last year (I think).

The reason this hadn't been used? Well, I tried to wind it into a center-pull ball shortly after I purchased it and found that it was horribly tangled. So I promptly put it in the back of the stash and forgot about it until last weekend. When I rediscovered it, I sucked it up and wound it into a ball by hand so I could finally cast on for my shawl. A week later, it was finished:

Pattern: Ishbel by Ysolda Teague from Whimsical Little Knits

Yarn: Malabrigo Sock (100% superwash merino), colorway Persia, less than one skein
Needles: 32" US 6 (4 mm) Addi Turbo circs
Started/Completed: April 17/April 25
Mods: none

There isn't much to say about this shawl that probably hasn't already been said. It's a fun, quick little knit, with just enough lace to be entertaining. The fact that I finished it in a week with a baby in the house says a lot.

I'm looking forward to wearing this in the mornings for my walk into work; it's still been fairly chilly here most mornings, and I've been wearing my Swallowtail Shawl to death the past several weeks. It'll be nice to have an alternate.

I also seem to have caught the lace bug again and have become enamored of small, shawlette-sized pieces, so I've cast on for another one -- Traveling Woman in some of my handspun Falkland. It feels good to be knitting productively again!

Seasonally Inappropriate

It figures that I finished a lovely pair of mittens just as the weather is getting really spring-like. That'll teach me to start a project when I'm 39 weeks pregnant!


Pattern: Vespergyle Mittens by Elinor Brown
Yarn: Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift (100% Shetland wool), colors 101/Shetland Black, 28 grams, and 274/Green Mist, 30 grams
Needles: 32" US 0 (2.0 mm) Knit Picks circs, worked magic loop
Started/Completed: December 10, 2009/April 16, 2010
Mods: none

These were a lot of fun to knit. I'd acquired the yarn from Kenny some time ago; he'd started a vest with this yarn and decided he no longer wanted it, so I benefitted from his leftovers. This was my first experience knitting with Shetland, and I quickly discovered why it's so often favored for color work. This stuff is sticky! Several times while I knit these mittens I inadvertently dropped a stitch, but because of the hairiness of the yarn, those stitches went nowhere. This is the stuff you could use for a steek that doesn't need to be reinforced before you cut.

I wouldn't say that this yarn rates among my favorites, though. It's a tad bit on the scratchy side -- enough that I wouldn't use it for anything that's meant to be worn next to sensitive skin -- and I found it to be spun rather inconsistently. And while the finished pattern looks great, this yarn doesn't have the distinctive stitch definition that I usually like.

Still, I'm quite pleased with these mittens and really enjoyed knitting them (don't let that start to completion span fool you!). When I started them, I was sure Rainbow was going to be late and I thought I'd be able to squeeze them in before she arrived, thus giving me something I could actually use during the winter. Instead, these will be packed up for next winter -- something to look forward to!

Before I go, a recent Rainbow shot, by popular demand. Here she is last weekend, expressing her pleasure in having a clean diaper and a cute outfit:

A New Favorite

This was meant to be posted yesterday for Spinning Sunday, but I was foiled by a cloudy weekend and didn't have good light for taking pictures -- at least not pictures that could do this yarn justice.

I haven't participated in the All Spun Up spinalongs for a while because of my limited time to spin since Rainbow was born, but when I heard that the fiber for the April/May SAL was a BFL/silk blend, I knew I couldn't miss it. I also had a feeling that it was going to be in colors I'd like. The fiber did not disappoint. Some people had spots of green in their braids, but mine was pretty much all shades of blue with some white.

I really wanted to spin this into a laceweight yarn, because I knew that the luster of the BFL combined with the shine and strength of the silk would make for a gorgeous thin yarn, but I also knew that I might never finish if I tried to spin lace again (I haven't forgotten how it took me almost a month to spin the laceweight Shetland). Instead, I decided to spin it a little thicker, if only in the interest of getting it done so I could enjoy it. The finished yarn is about sport to DK weight, and my four or so ounces yielded approximately 245 yards. I had a little bit leftover on one bobbin that I chain plied, but I haven't yet finished it or measured it.

The beauty of this yarn is really nearly impossible to capture. It is amazingly shiny and soft, and the depth of blues is just not done justice by these pictures.

It's quite possible that this fiber blend is my new favorite. Next time I have an opportunity to get my hands on some, it will definitely become laceweight. As to this yarn, well, I think it'll make a really luxurious cowl or scarf -- eventually.

Next post: an actual finished knitted project!

The Mystery Revealed

One of my favorite things to do on Ravelry is visit the "fiber to finished object" threads on various spinning boards. I love seeing how the original fiber -- sometimes even in the form of a fleece -- becomes yarn and then a finished project. I have one of those to share with you today, and now I can reveal exactly what it was that you saw in that sneak peek in my last post.

In this case, I started out with this fiber from Sakina Needles that I purchased nearly two years ago from the Loopy Ewe. It was BFL (that's blue-faced leicester, for those of you who don't speak sheep) in a colorway called Smokestack. I started with four ounces.

Because BFL is a longwool, meaning it has a long staple length (that's the length of an individual hair), it works really well as a singles yarn. Singles yarns typically use less twist, because without being plied in the opposite direction with another single, too much twist will cause the yarn to kink up. Shorter-stapled fibers, like merino or cashmere, need more twist to hold them together in a yarn, so they are usually better suited to plied yarns. Longwools, however, can hold together just fine with less twist, so that's what I decided to do with my fiber. I spun a heavy laceweight single with my BFL. To finish it, to ensure that I worked out as much extra twist as I could and that it would stay together, I slightly fulled it by dunking it in hot and cold baths a few times then gave it a vigorous thwacking against the side of the bathtub. I ended up with about 530 yards.

Because I had used Malabrigo Lace as my guide when I started spinning this yarn, I thought it only appropriate that I substitute my handspun for that Malabrigo in a pattern I'd had in my queue:

Pattern: Citron by Hilary Smith Callis, winter '09 Knitty
Yarn: my handspun (details here)
Needles: 32" US 6 (4.0 mm) Addi Turbo circs
Started/Completed: March 13/April 3
Mods: none

This was a really simple knit and fairly fast -- it only took me as long as it did because those last rows are so long (the ruffle at the end has more than 500 stitches per row!), and as you know, I have limited knitting time these days. It was an interesting experience to block, because this is the first shawl I've knit that I did not need to be blocked aggressively. I merely smoothed it out and pinned the top edge of the shawl so it would dry fairly straight, and then I pulled at the ruffle here and there so it would ruffle nicely.

I'm really quite thrilled with this little shawlette. The yarn developed a really pretty halo while I knitted it, and I love how it striped with the pattern. I think the best compliment I received on it was when I was working on it at Natural Stitches and another customer in the shop asked where she could find the yarn I was working with.

Finally I have a couple of questions to answer. Both were left in the comments to my last post. (I try to respond to all the comments I get by e-mail, but sometimes there is no e-mail address associated with the comment and I'm unable to respond.) Samantha, of the Fiber Freaks blog, wanted to know how I spin my yarns. Although I first learned the basics of spinning on a drop spindle, I very quickly moved to a wheel. I bought my Lendrum DT about two years ago and have been using it exclusively ever since.

Liz T. also wanted to know if I had any cute Easter pictures to share. Unfortunately no, because we don't celebrate Easter. But we have gotten some cute shots of Rainbow recently, so I'll try to sneak a few into the next post.

Bannockburn

If you're reading this, I want to thank you for bearing with me while I get used to having a baby in the house, working full time, and still managing to get in some knitting and spinning time. Eventually I hope to get back to my more regular schedule of posting two to three times a week, but for now I hate to post when there's nothing exciting to show you.

But for today, I do have a couple of things. First up is the March shipment of the Crown Mountain Farms Fiber Club, which I finally finished on Friday night after spending most of the month of March on it. It started out looking like this, 4 ounces of shetland in a colorway called Bannockburn (and I'm afraid my photo doesn't do it any justice):

I'd never spun shetland before, but I knew that shetland is often used in lace yarns, so that's what I decided to do. My two-ply laceweight is approximately 595 yards -- not my best lace yardage ever, but it should still be plenty to make something pretty.

I still have the April shipment (Wensleydale) to spin, but because I'm planning a laceweight singles yarn for that, I need a little break with something thicker. So I started in on some BFL/silk from All Spun Up that is the April/May spinalong fiber. It's an absolute dream to spin and should be finished relatively quickly as a result. That's a good thing, too, because I went a little crazy during the CMF March Madness sale, so I have a lot in the spinning queue.

Spinning is easier to do at home because there's no pattern to pay attention to and I don't have to mark my place if I have to stop suddenly, but now that I'm working again, I am getting a little bit of knitting done during my lunch break. I finished something yesterday, but it needs to be blocked before it gets its proper photo shoot, so for now I'll just give you a peek:

The End of the Road

Unbelievably, my maternity leave is over and I have to go back to work tomorrow. Rainbow will be starting daycare tomorrow as well. I'm really going to miss the time I've been spending with her, but I'm also very glad that I took the maximum amount of time off. It's amazing how much she's grown and developed in such a short period of time, and I know I'm going to miss a lot when I'm away from her all day. Luckily, she's going to daycare fairly close to my office, so I can always go visit her at lunch if I really need a Rainbow fix.

Something I'm also going to miss is my spinning time. I didn't do much knitting during my leave, first because I didn't have the energy or the attention span and then because it was too difficult to try to keep track of where I was in a pattern. Spinning was much easier to do because I could start and stop very easily if the little one needed some attention.

I finished one last yarn this week, and it's a beauty, if I do say so myself. I started with 4.2 ounces of superwash merino from my favorite fiber pusher, Kristin of All Spun Up. She usually doesn't name her colorways, but this particular color combination was hugely popular on the ASU Ravelry board and was dubbed "Goldfish Wearing a Tutu" by one of the spinners. Lucky for us, Kristin was able to replicate the colorway, and I was fortunate enough to find a braid of it in the shop.

I spun the entire top from one end to the other onto one bobbin. Here were the singles resting before plying; this is probably one of favorite spinning pictures ever.

I chain plied the singles and wound up with about 356 yards of fingering weight yarn. I'm thrilled with it.

I'm still working on my March Crown Mountain Farms fiber club shipment (in the middle of the second of two bobbins), and I'm hoping to finish that up by the end of the month so I can stay on schedule.

The good news about going back to work? I'll have some regular knitting time again (during my lunch hour), so maybe I'll finish something. Like, for instance, the Citron I cast on for yesterday at Natural Stitches with my handspun BFL singles.

A Needle in a ... Nevermind

Much to my surprise, I finished spinning up another yarn this week -- my third for the month. This fiber came from deep stash; the information with the photo on my Flickr account tells me that I uploaded the picture of it in June 2008, which means that I purchased this fiber right around the time we moved into our house. This was four ounces of BFL from Sakina Needles, purchased from the Loopy Ewe, in a colorway called Smokestack (not "haystack," as I kept thinking).

I liked doing singles so much on the last spinalong I participated in that I decided to do them again for this yarn. Laceweight singles, to be specific. I ended up with approximately 531 yards -- a bit less than I was hoping for, but still a respectable yardage.

By their nature, singles can have extra twist in them because they're not plied, so to make sure I didn't have a twisty mess on my hands, I fulled the yarn slightly by alternating wet and cold soaks and then thwacked the life out of it. There are still some kinks and waves here and there, but because I plan to use this for lace that will be blocked, they shouldn't be a problem.

BFL is great for singles. It has a beautiful sheen and a slight halo. I'm not going to be knitting this up in the immediate future, but I think it might become a Citron one day.

Finally, because you asked, here's another Rainbow picture. This was taken last Saturday after a trip out to the hair salon (Mommy needed a cut badly!) and lunch. She was wearing more handknits than I was!

I thought she looked quite stylish in her Tomato Hat and Socks That Rock BSJ, and her Chalice Blanket was definitely keeping her quite cozy!

Still Snowing

I suppose my slow knitting progress isn't as bad as I thought, at least as far as the usefulness of the projects I've been working on is concerned. I was worried that by the time I finished my Vespergyle Mittens, for instance, the time for mittens would be long gone. Unfortunately, that might not be the case. We're in the middle of of the snowiest February on record here in Western Pennsylvania -- close to 40 inches already! We're also on track for the snowiest season ever as well. The record is 82 inches, and I think we're already close to 70. If I can keep up the pace on my mittens, I might just get to wear them before the snow melts. The first one is done:

I think I managed to finish the second half of the hand in a matter of days when I picked it up again, but for some reason (I think her name is Rainbow!) it took me several more weeks before I got around to doing the thumb. The second mitten is cast on and has about two rows of cuff, so I'm hoping to get in a few rows here and there when I can.

As far as spinning is concerned, I'm nearly done with four ounces of BFL that I'm spinning into laceweight singles. Up next is this beauty, 4.2 ounces of superwash merino from my favorite fiber pusher. One of the regulars on the Ravelry ASU board named this combination of colors "Goldfish Wearing a Tutu," and it caused such a stir on the board that Kristin has continued to dye up a few braids of it every now and then. I've missed many of her updates lately (mostly because I'm just not online as much as I used to be), not to mention the fact that I haven't been buying fiber, but when I happened to catch this update and saw this one braid still in the shop, I grabbed it.

Time has been flying here. Rainbow is now two months old, and I have to go back to work in a little less than a month. I'm going to miss my little one when we're not together all day -- though it will be nice to have someone else change her diapers every now and then!

That's More Like It!

After the last spin took more than a month to complete, I knew I had to spin faster or thicker to make up time and stay on track with my goal of spinning each month's club fiber in that month. Faster probably isn't a realistic option, given my limited spinning time, so thicker was the answer for February. That seemed the right choice, anyway, for this fiber -- take a look at these bright colors!

This four ounces of Finn top from the Crown Mountain Farms fiber club just begged to be a bouncy, tightly twisted, barberpoled two ply. And that's just what I spun.

I got about 206 yards of two ply that ranges from about sport to about DK weight (I'm definitely better at spinning more evenly when I'm spinning thinner). There are spots where both plies are the same color, more or less, but the majority of the skein is nicely barberpoled.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to make with this yarn just yet, though I'm thinking it might make a nice pair of mittens one day. Supposedly Finn is good for felting, so I think a cozy pair of mittens that slowly felt with wear will be just the ticket. This was my first time spinning with this fiber, and I definitely enjoyed it. It's softer than the Falkland I spun last, though not as soft as merino, and has a longer staple length, similar to BFL.

The colors in real life are somewhere in between this photo and the ones above. They are quite vibrant, and something tells me that Rainbow will really like the pinks and purples when she gets a little older.

Speaking of Rainbow, did someone ask for more baby pictures?

This is how the Mister can hold her and be on the computer at the same time. She really likes being bundled up like this.

A Day Late Ain't Bad

Having a newborn around doesn't leave much time for anything other than feeding, sleeping, and changing diapers, but as Rainbow has gotten a little older and we've settled into more of a regular schedule, I've been able to sneak in a little more fibery time on a daily basis. I haven't felt much of an urge to knit, but, as I mentioned in my last post, I was feeling a strong yen for my wheel. I know that this year I won't be able to churn out as much handspun as I did last year, but I'm at least determined to spin the four ounces each month that come from Crown Mountain Farms as part of the 2010 fiber club.

January's shipment was Falkland top, a fiber I had just spun for the last All Spun Up spinalong. This time I decided to go for a chain-plied fingering weight -- chain plying to preserve the colors, because I worried that regular plying might muddy up the colors. In the end, I wound up with approximately 344 yards, which is pretty respectable in my book given my time away from spinning. And it only took me one day into February to finish plying.

I used my usual tight plying twist, which caused the skein to kink up up a little right off the wheel, but a good wash-and-whack caused it to relax nicely. I'm quite happy with this one, but I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet.

Up next: Finn top in shades of purple-y blue and hot pink. I'm doing a thicker two ply, so it should be done well before the end of the month, provided the baby continues to cooperate.

Remember Me?

Why, hello there! I'm still here, though life is certainly different. Amazingly, my little peanut is four weeks old today. She's already put on a fair amount of weight and grown an inch in length, no doubt in large part due to the amount she's been eating (we're talking 8-10 feedings a day). Taking care of her doesn't allow me much free time, especially when she's fussy between feedings, but I have managed to work some fibery pursuits back into my life here and there.

I discovered very early on that I was really missing my wheel, especially because my January shipment from the Crown Mountain Farms fiber club arrived early. This is Falkland wool in a colorway called Awakenings.

I've already started spinning it up relatively thin with the plan to chain ply it to preserve the color repeats. This bump is only four ounces, but considering that I'm only managing to spin a few minutes at a time, this yarn is going to take a while to complete.

I've also managed to put in a few rows of colorwork here and there and finished the hand of my first Vespergyle Mitten:

I'm really happy with how this turned out. The thumb shouldn't take very long to complete (especially as the colorwork isn't as complicated), but I have a feeling the mate won't be finished until long after winter.

Because I'm a bit light on knitting and spinning content, will you settle for some gratuitous baby pictures?

Here's Rainbow after last night's bath, only the second time she made it through the ordeal without screaming.

And here are a couple of shots of her sleeping today, first swaddled in the bassinet ...

and then on the bed next to me right before a feeding. This is how she'll sleep if we don't swaddle her arms at her sides. Cracks me up.

And now I must run, because it sounds like someone just dirtied her diaper. Oh, the joys of motherhood!

The Best Thing I Ever Made

Some of you may have deduced from my absence on the blogosphere that I've been a bit busy. Look who decided to make her grand entrance:

Rainbow arrived on her due date(!) this past Tuesday, December 15, at 6:39 p.m. She was 7 lbs. 9 oz. and 20 1/2 inches long at birth. We're experiencing some of the usual challenges involved in being first-time parents and a first-time baby, but the Mister and I are enjoying every minute and are utterly smitten with our daughter.

I expect it will be a while before I'm posting and commenting regularly -- I'm going to be a bit busy in the weeks and months to come!

On a Kick

After finishing my Corazon mittens, I was in the mood to knit some more colorwork mittens, so I cast on for another pair, knowing full well that they probably wouldn't get completed for quite some time. I had seen the Vespergyle Mittens on Ravelry a couple of days earlier, and I knew I had a lot of colorwork-appropriate fingering weight yarn in my stash, so it was an easy choice to make.

This is Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift that I acquired from Kenny. It's my first time working with shetland, and I can see why it's so often used for colorwork -- this stuff is sticky! I somehow dropped a stitch at some point and it literally went nowhere. I'm significantly past where this picture shows at this point (the thumb gore is almost done). I'll have to take another picture when I can get some good light to do it justice, because the pattern is really pretty.

Meanwhile, I've also been keeping myself somewhat busy with my Lady Eleanor Stole, which now has about five skeins of Noro Kureyon worked into it. Unfortunately, it's turning out a tad shorter than I expected considering I've used half of my yarn at this point. Here it is thus far, with a book for scale.

As luck would have it, the colorway I picked is now discontinued. Luckily, a bit of Googling turned up an online yarn store that still had some in stock, so three more skeins are on their way to me. I'm hoping that the extra yardage and a good blocking will result in a stole I can really wrap around myself.

Baby Watch 2009 continues. Tomorrow is my official due date, but I think it may be a while yet before Rainbow makes her grand debut.

Mi Corazon

What do you do when you're itching to start a new project (but can't start something really big) and it's suddenly freezing outside? Knit a pair of mittens!

Pattern: Corazon by Joeli Caparco, winter '06 Knitty
Yarn: Knit Picks Telemark (100% Peruvian highland wool), colorways Alpine Frost (approximately 1.5 skeins) and Snow Leopard (approximately half a skein)
Needles: US 2 (2.75 mm) and US 3 (3.25 mm) dpns
Started/Completed: December 6/December 9
Mods: moved top decreases in one stitch from the edge and grafted a little sooner than specified

As colorwork patterns go, these were pretty easy. The tops of the mittens contain the pattern that requires paying attention to the chart, while the pattern on the palm side is just a simple alternating of the two colors. I really did knit the first mitten in a day (though understand that it was over the course of most of the day, meaning more than five hours of knitting time total). The second one took just a few evenings of casual stitching.

This pattern had been in my Ravelry queue for quite a while, and I'd even swatched for them a long time ago, back before we moved into our house. Somehow, even without writing anything down, I'd remembered that I'd need to go down a needle size than what was specified in the pattern, so when I finally pulled out the pattern and my yarn, I just cast on.

Though these were a fast knit, I can't say I'm completely thrilled with the outcome. They came out a little on the squat side, though they do fit fine, and I had some issues picking up the stitches above the thumb hole -- though that's really more to do with the fact that I was trying to pick up stitches knit with two colors. The yarn is also a little on the rough side, but it's designed for colorwork in outerwear garments, which means these mittens should wear well. I'll have plenty of opportunity to try them out right away, too, because it's been snowing all day here and is supposed to go down into the teens tonight! Brrr!

Knitting While I Wait

No baby yet. I'm 39 weeks today, so one more week until my due date and until I start getting really impatient for her to arrive. I'll keep you posted.

Today I had lunch with Amy, who surprised me with a beautiful gift for Rainbow -- this fuzzy flannel quilt.

As you can see, it goes perfectly with the decor of the nursery (which is just as well, because I'd be tempted to keep it for myself it if didn't!). The reverse is white with little pastel hearts, and you can see the swirls of the quilting a little better.

The quilt is super soft and will be great for both wrapping Rainbow up and putting it on the floor to cushion her. I fully expect that it will become her special blankie as she grows up! Thank you so much, Amy!

It was actually good that we met up today, because in the middle of lunch, I started coming down with a migraine (the first symptom of which is always a loss of vision on one side of my visual field). I couldn't very well go back to work when I couldn't see, and as Amy was on her way to Trader Joe's and Natural Stitches, she was kind enough to give me a lift home. Thankfully I was able to sleep it off and am feeling better, but it did put a bit of a damper on the day.

But enough about my headache. This is a knitting blog, right? I've been hesitant to start any big new project, so I pulled out an old WIP in the past week or so. Remember the sock yarn scrap blanket? I finished two more squares in the past several days.

This photo is pretty bad -- the outer border on the square on the left is is really shades of pink and purple with a bit of orange (it's Lorna's Laces left over from my Hederas). If my counting is correct, these are my ninth and tenth completed squares. My original goal was about 20, so that means I'm halfway there. The next square is started (in greens), but beyond that I think I'm going to have to get pretty creative with my yarns, as my scraps are starting to run low.

On Sunday, I didn't have much to do (well, the Mister wouldn't let me do much of anything, I should say), so I decided to throw caution to the wind and start a new project. I thought I'd stick to something small that could be completed pretty quickly just in case and something that would be useful. Mittens! The first one was finished that night.

The pattern is Corazon, from an old issue of Knitty. It'd been in my queue for a long time, and the yarn (Knit Picks Telemark) has been marinating in the stash long enough that one of the colors appears to have been discontinued. I'm a few rows into the colorwork on the second mitten, so I should be able to finish up the pair in the next couple of days.

Twice the Fun

Here is the very last pre-baby handspun post, because the wheel has been officially retired to the third-floor fiber room to make room for the bassinet in the bedroom.

I started out with this fiber, approximately four ounces of hand-dyed Falkland that made up the November/December All Spun Up spinalong. I'd sat out the previous SAL, but I couldn't resist trying a new-to-me fiber this time around. The colors in this braid were just gorgeous and incredibly hard to capture on camera -- deep plummy purples, sapphire blues, forest greens, and just a hint of orangey gold.

I had a bit of a hard time deciding what to do with this fiber initially. Someone on the ASU Ravelry board had mentioned that Falkland is great for singles yarns because of its long staple length, and as I hadn't tried a singles yarn since the Tour de Fleece, that sounded like a good idea. I split the top in half down the length of it to make it easier to handle and sat down at the wheel. My original intent was to get a worsted-weight single, but as usual I kept reverting to something thinner than that. So the first 2 oz. of fiber (which nearly filled one bobbin) ended up somewhere in the range of sport to DK weight and approximately 200 yards. I'm not sure what I'll make with it yet (hat? mittens?), but I'm enjoying looking at it for now.

As I was spinning, I was keeping an eye on the SAL thread on the Ravelry board and saw some gorgeous laceweight singles someone else had spun with this fiber. So, I decided to use the second half of the fiber for that. This 2 oz. yielded about 406 yards, so probably enough for a small shawl or lacy scarf.

Both yarns turned out very well. I finished them using some cold water shocks to slightly full the yarn and did some pretty aggressive thwacking. I was pleasantly surprised by how little abuse I had to inflict to get the skeins to hang straight -- straighter even than some of the plied yarns I've spun in the past.

I'm already feeling a little spinning withdrawal, so I'm hoping I'll be able to get the wheel back out before too long. If I really feel the urge to spin, I might even have to get out my spindle and practice my spindling skills!

Like an Old Friend

Knitting has slowed considerably here chez Knit/Wit. I'm still working on some small things during my lunch break, but I've been loath to to start any new project for fear that the baby will decide to make her appearance before I'm done and it'll never be finished or, worse, she won't come until I finish.

So, instead, I dug through my "other crafts" bin and pulled out some cross stitching. It's been fun to get reacquainted with my needle and floss. I used to do quite a bit of stitching before the knitting bug bit me, and I was extremely surprised to find a baby piece nearly finished. I must've started it for someone years ago but never finished, and as there was only a little bit of work left to do, I appropriated it for myself. (Well, for Rainbow, technically, but I'll enjoy it longer than she will.) As it stands now, there's just back-stitching and filling in the details (name, date, weight/length) left to do:

My reluctance to start any major projects has extended to my spinning as well. I spent the weekend finishing up the falkland fiber from the latest All Spun Up spinalong. I was equally nervous about getting caught with a project in progress on the wheel, so I opted for singles instead of anything plied. I wound up splitting my fiber in half and doing two different weights; now I just need to be home when there's some sun out to get a photo or two.

As sad as it makes me, I will soon be putting the wheel away to make room for the bassinet in the bedroom. I'm hoping that it won't have to hibernate too long; as an incentive, I decided to treat myself and signed up for the Crown Mountain Farms Fiber Club for next year. I'd already decided to let my Rockin' Sock Club lapse for next year (seeing as I have about a year's worth of yarn from it still unknit in my stash), and this seemed like a good present to myself. I'll be getting 4 ounces of fiber each month, and I opted for the surprise colorway each month. The real appeal of the club is that the fiber type is different each month, so I'll get to try lots of fibers that are new to me. I may not get much spinning done early on, but I'm betting that once Rainbow is a couple of months old, I'll be able to manage 4 oz. a month. Even if it winds up sitting in the stash for a while, it'll still be nice to get a fibery surprise every month!