Halloween Batts

These are my Halloween Batts.

It's scary how much fleece I have to card. It took me about 9 hours to pick about 80% of it. Then today I carded about 20% of it which took about 4 hours. It still had lots of VM in it even after skirting, washing, dyeing, and carding. I did just enough today so I had something to spin this weekend. I can't wait to see how it spins up and I hope my self striping idea works out.

The Next Big Thing

This is my next project: I'm going to make this sweater out of a Romney-Cotswold cross that I bought on Ebay. I took the whole fleece and washed it and then spent the last two days dyeing it. I'm happy with the colors that came out. I used Acid-dyes. Now I'm going to let it dry, card it, and attempt to spin a semi-self-striping yarn. This is a frick-load (new made-up word)of yarn and it will take a long long time to spin. I reserve the right to change projects mid-way if the yarn does not suit the pattern in the end. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Lazy Kate, I think you are great!

Everything happened so fast. I ordered a Lazy Kate from Paradise Fibers on Monday. I used standard shipping (4-10 days). It arrived at my house on Wednesday. It looked a lot like Ikea furniture at first, but 10 minutes later I had it assembled. Why did I wait so long to get one in the first place? Plying is so much better now.

Blocked on a Box

Is there a better way?

Branching Out

I'm almost done with my Branching Out scarf. I took this photo in the morning and have since cast off. I've been listing to podcasts on my computer today and knitting. I love This American Life and I also enjoy the Yarnspinners Tales.

There are several pounds of fleece sitting out in the garage waiting to be washed, but we've got a problem here. The sink will not drain. My husband checked back as far as he could but could not find the problem. There are several other plumbing problems in my house and my husband can usually fix things, but this time we have to call a plumber. It's probably because I wash fleece in the sink and bits of wool and tons of lanolin get washed down the drain. We'll see. Yuck.

Long time no Blog

It's been a while. First I got some kind of stomach flu that had me down for about 5 days. I was so mad because these were my days off and I could have gotten so much done. But no! I just laid around watching cable news. The stocks were falling. The bailout passed. By the way, one of the earmarks (extension of funding) was for the Wool Trust---wool research. I couldn't find the exact section (325?) I just read about people complaining about it.

After my 5 days of vacation (ha-ha) I got back to work and didn't get much spinning, knitting, etc. done. Eventually I found time to finish my laptop bag. I also started the Branching Out pattern from Knitty. I'm using the lime-over-dyed-with-avocado yarn from my last post.

Over-Dyeing

After over-dyeing the ugly pastel orange yarn I realized that a person does not have to live with ugly color. Inspired by this concept I took out some wool that I had dyed a very neon green. I blended it with some Merino top and spun the batts into a 2-ply. Then I got some "Avocado" dye and over-dyed the skeins. I'm happy with the mossy green that showed up. Now I'll actually use this yarn.