Playing catch-up...

I've been home sick for the last couple of days so I've had the chance to catch-up on some personal stuff (like 13 loads of laundry with Omar on Friday) and get a bunch of work done on fiber projects that need attention before the end of the year.  I also photoshopped a bunch of photos for the blog, so depending on how much time it takes, I'm going to try and get a bunch of FO's and UFO's up on the blog for your amusement.

 My greatest accomlishment of the weekend was to finish spinning and plying all the fiber for my friend AJ's toddler sweater project.  I started with 24 oz. of "Love Me Tender" superwash merino fiber from Crown Mountain Farms. I tore it into long strips and spun up six bobbins of approx 4 oz each.  I then plied them into three skeins of 2ply yarn at a grand total of 744 yards.  I have a feeling it will be plenty for a sweater or two!  In the photo below you can see some unspun fiber, spun singles and a test swatch that AJ knitted up.

Roving, Bobbins & Swatch 
I originally gave her a choice of a two or a three ply and she liked the two ply better because the colors were more speckled.   The three ply looked much more tweedy.  I will post a photo of the finished yarn after I wash and set the twist.  I didn't have a chance to get a good photo in the natural sunlight today.

While I was spinning this yarn I was watching the Quantum edition of What the Bleep Do We Know.  If you haven't seen this movie, you must!  It's about quantum physics and how it and the power of the mind effect how we perceive, or don't perceive, reality.  The feature version is probably around twoish hours.  The Quantum version available on the three disc DVD is over 5 1/2 fascinating hours!  When it was over, I wanted to watch it again...  I may wait for my next big yarn commission ;-)  So many amazing revelations... Check out the movie and let me know what you think!

Tomorrow is Summer's first day at HMI.  She is going to be the new Program Administrator.  I really excited to have her as part of the family.   Not only is she a talented arts admin type person, she is also crafty!  She's a knitter and likes to make photo scrapbooks.  I made this skein of hand dyed merino/tencel yarn for her as a welcome gift.

Yarn for Summer! Yeah!!

 Another project I'm currently pondering is my feather and fan rainbow lace scarf.  I purchased this yarn from Sue Grougan's Esty shop.  She makes really nice rainbows.  This was my first experiment with lace and I love it.  The challenge was to figure out how many repeats to make in order to have a scarf that isn't too long or too short.  I think I ended up starting it with not enough repeats, resulting in possibly a too long scarf.  I've decide to rip it out and start over.  I think I'm going to add two more repeats that way it will end up being much wider and hopefully just the right length.  BTW, check out the felted bowl I made many months ago (shown in the second photo) that I discovered makes a great center pull ball holder/protector!

Too early to tell... 
So pretty, but going to be way too long. Time to rip out... I'm scared!

 Here's another Sue Grougan rainbow.  I saw this fiber/yarn on her website To Knit, Perchance to Dream and asked her to send me some rovings so I could try it myself!  This was an instant gratification project compared to most I've been working on lately.  It spun up fast to a 282 yard, 2ply and looked super cool when finished.  Not nearly as perfect as Sue's sock yarn, but it certainly shows promise!  I'm still figuring out how to spin tightly enough to get the ply to grip together, but no so tightly that it looks like two pieces of rope wound together.  (I love it when the fiber just poofs together like magic.)  This particular skein falls somewhere in the middle I think...

Look at the pretty rainbow!!