I’m kind of amazed how quickly I flew through spinning up the January 2010 Hello Yarn Fiber Club roving. It arrived in my mailbox on the 11th (I think), I photographed it on the 14th, and then it was on the wheel that night. The yarn was done by the end of the week, finished on the 23rd, and dry in time to be photographed on Friday.

Okay, that doesn’t sound so quick when I put numbers on it, but considering I have spinning projects that can take me a month or two from start to finish, depending on what other things catch my interest, this was blindingly fast.

Singles!

I chose to spin this up as singles, since I don’t do singles very often. I’ve been itching to do them, and when Adrian planted the suggestion in the Hello Yarn group when she posted the spoiler pictures, I knew this was the one. These came out so soft and buttery. It still has a bit of an itch to me because it’s mohair, but it’s definitely one of the softest and lightest yarns I’ve spun. Of course I went for fingering weight, since I really don’t knit with anything else, and I can see this becoming a really nice lacy scarf.

Lacy Baktus

I was able to cross the finish line for the Ravelympics at least once this year. I finished my Lacy Baktus on Thursday, the 25th, about two or three days later than I expected to finish. I wanted to finish on Monday or Tuesday, to ensure that I had plenty of time to wind up the yarn and knit Simple Things. I don’t have fancy ball winders and swifts, so winding up yarn can be time consuming. I did eventually get everything set and started on the Simple Things on Friday afternoon.

As of Sunday afternoon

I chugged away at it all weekend, and I got really damn close to finishing it. There were definitely some hurdles– a bit of tinking, and some finagling to compensate for some overlooked yos on one side.By 1:15am CST on Sunday night (or technically Monday morning), I had 13 rows to go. Given that Simple Things is a triangle shawl, and rows on triangle shawls just get increasingly longer to knit, I knew that 45 minutes was hardly enough time to finish 3 rows, much less 13. So, I threw in the towel and went to bed.

I still have 11 rows to go, and I’m hoping to finish it up sometime this week. I don’t want to drag this out just because I’m not working toward a deadline anymore. I want to be able to get back to spinning and reading sometime soon!

I did finally decide on a project for the Ravelympics. I’m working on a very shiny Lacy Baktus shawl/scarf thing. I’m using my Air handspun for pretty shinies and stripes. And shiny is definitely appropriate, since I’m knitting for Team Ooh, Shiny!

Two days in

It’s knitting up really fast. I took the photo above this afternoon, and it’s probably doubled in size since then. Tonight was a big movie night, so there was plenty of knitting time. I watched Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with L, and then I watched Penelope by myself. I’d recommend both movies.

I’m fully expecting to finish this project well within the Olympic deadline. If it’s not finished before the end of the week, I’d be really, really surprised. So, I’m making plans for a second project. Most likely, it’ll be Simple Things, knit with the merino/silk I finished spinning (but haven’t yet finished) this weekend. Once I clear off my niddy noddy, I’ll wind that up, give it a bath, and it should be ready for knitting by the time I finish the Baktus.

Colorful and stripey

I finished the Patchwork socks a while ago. According to Ravelry, on January 27th. I’m just really, really forgetful when it comes to taking pictures and even more forgetful when it comes to blogging. They’re nice socks, though, and I’m wearing them for the first time today.

And I can’t believe that even though the sock on the right is totally longer than the sock on the left, it still looks like it’s shorter. Crazy striping, playing tricks on the eyes.

I’m plugging away on finishing up the merino silk. I finished off the first bobbin a week or two ago, and I’m making pretty good progress on the second. I didn’t really expect to spend so much time spinning as I have been, but I guess Mass Effect 2 isn’t proving to be as addicting as Dragon Age was. It’s still a great game, but for some reason it just doesn’t have the same pull that keeps me playing for hours and hours, for weeks on end. Hopefully, I’ll finish up the second bobbin soon, so I can devote my time to the Ravelympics.

And speaking of the Ravelympics, is it bad that I haven’t decided on a project yet? I was planning on knitting the Bitterroot shawl from the Winter 2009 Knitty, but I counted up the yardage of the yarn I was planning to use, and it comes in just slightly over what the pattern calls for. And I’m a little afraid that the yarn is being stretched on my niddy noddy, which would mean there’s even less yarn than I counted. I’d hate to knit 95% of the shawl, only to discover I’m short. Then I don’t have a shawl and I don’t have a finished Ravelympics project. So, tonight I’m going home and searching through my stash for something that wants to be knit. I’m kind of tempted to use the yarn I was using for an Estes vest for the Rooibos vest Knitty Surprise. The Estes vest is definitely a candidate for frogging, and the Roobios vest is a pretty good substitute pattern for that yarn. Otherwise, I’m going to end of defaulting to socks, and that’s just boring. I always knit socks, and the Ravelympics is, in my opinion, a good time to challenge myself a little and do something a little different. I still have about 26 hours to decide. That’s plenty of time to make up my mind, right?

Again, in the interest of taking good notes about my spinning…

Next on the wheel is some Merino Silk from Bee Mice Elf. I picked this up over the summer, expecting it to be Tour de Fleece spinning, and then I ran out of days in the TdF. I also ran out of spinning mojo, and so the roving just marinated in the stash for a while, while I thought about what it wanted to be. I’ve decided on a 2-ply fingering weight, with little rhyme or reason to the splitting of the roving.

I ended up dividing the roving into halves, and then halves again, and then halves again, ending up with 8 chunks of roving. I took four pieces for each ply, trying to match the colors on the ends so that I’d have plenty of options for matching the ends together as I spin. When I join roving strips, I like to join like colors. It’s a very strong preference, bordering on compulsion (everything MUST match!). So, again, with the need to join like ends together, as I split the roving sections lengthwise into easily spinnable pieces, I made sure there were an even number of strips from each section. Or at least enough matching like ends so that I didn’t have any orphan pieces that couldn’t join anywhere.

The fiber is all ready to go, and I was hoping to start it up soon, but I’m actually not sure when I’ll get to it. I’ve finally been able to tear myself away from Dragon Age and the Xbox long enough to get back into spinning and knitting, and now it’s nearly January 26th: the release date for Mass Effect 2. I’ve been anticipating this one for-effing-ever, and I don’t think it’s going to disappoint. So, poor roving is probably going to have to wait for me for a few weeks.

The reason I consider this spinning something different is because I don’t anticipate knitting socks with this yarn, given its fancy merino silk nature. And I always spin things anticipating socks. OMG.

I’m working on a sneaky, geeky little embroidery project.

What does it say?

I’m pleased with the progress so far. Not too shabby for someone who hasn’t done any embroidery before. And I think I may have to hang it in my office when it’s finished. I need something geeky for my walls. Hell, I just need something for these walls.

I finished up a lot of spinning last week. On Friday, I finished off Night Sky, and it was about time. I started that one back in December, when I thought I’d want more sock yarn for my trip to New York for Christmas. I am totally in love with the resulting yarn.

Perfect fingering weight, and it's blue!

I am getting damn good at this spinning sock yarn. And I should be, since I don’t often spin much else.

Sweater yarn, on the other hand…. not so great. I’ve been working on a big bag of wool for about 15 months now, since I purchased it at Wisconsin Sheep and Wool in 2008. The plan was to spin for an October Frost sweater [rav link], and I definitely purchased more than enough wool to do it. Unfortunately, despite trying really hard for a 2-ply worsted/aran yarn, I ended up with several skeins of super bulky. Is there something bigger than super bulky? They might even be that. So, I cast the project aside for a couple of months, vowing to come back to it.

And I did, back last spring and summer. I picked it up again, deciding to try a navajo ply. I thought I’d be able to get the yarn done faster that way because I could spin up a bunch of bobbins, and then just continually ply. Of course, I didn’t expect the singles to wind onto bobbins much more tightly and efficiently than the plied yarn, so that caused a few problems. And then I burnt myself out on the Tour de Fleece, and I ended up taking a long break from the yarn. Still, the yarn looked great, and though I was worried about making yardage for the October Frost, I was still optimistic. There were several ounces left in the bag of wool, and I thought it was still possible there would be enough.

I picked up spinning those last few ounces of wool last weekend. I powered through all of it on Saturday because I just wanted the bag and all the skeins off the floor of my office (and thus do away with one of the BEST CAT BEDS EVAR!!11). Unfortunately, after spending so much time spinning fine yarns, I had a really hard time getting singles that would work for an aran weight. I plied the singles up on this passed Friday afternoon, and to my dismay, I ended up with something on the lighter end of worsted. It may even be more like DK in far too many places, and I think I have to discard these skeins. Well, exclude them from this project, at least. I cry.

So, definitely do not have enough yardage for the October Frost. I’m not entirely sure what the actual yardage is yet, but I think at last yardage count, I had approximately 700 yards, well well under the 1600 I was aiming for.

I guess that means I’ll just have to buy another big bag of wool and try again. Eventually.

This isn't 12 pairs of socks

The plan was to knit 12 pairs of socks in 2009, averaging out to 1 pair of socks for each month. Did it happen? Clearly not. I didn’t even get halfway to my goal, with only 5.25 pairs of socks knit by 11:59pm on December 31. But, I’m still going to declare myself a winner because I have 5.25 more pairs of knit socks than I did last year at this time. So there.

I think the biggest problem with the sockfest for me was boredom. I love knitting socks. I think that’s pretty obvious when looking at all my FOs, the majority of them are socks. But sometimes, I like to work on other things: the occasional hat, pair of fingerless mitts, crochet bag.

So maybe the goal I picked for 2009 was a little unreasonable, if only because of its narrow focus on only socks. And that brings me to this year, 2010. I think the best possible goal I can choose for this year is to again try to produce 12 FOs, but I am not going to limit myself to a particular type of item. Anything knit or crochet goes.

And because I’m a dork, I’m calling it 2010 FO Funtiem. So, off we go.

Not knitting, not spinning, but playing Dragon Age on the Xbox. Although the spinning and knitting is slowly working its way back into my things to do. There’s only so many times I can play through Dragon Age, I suppose. I guess that number might be 5.

I did finally finish my Patchwork yarn earlier this month. I’m not sure if it’s the most awesome or the ugliest yarn I’ve ever spun. It’s a toss up, I think, and I’m either going to have some really cool socks or some really ugly ones. Either way, they’ll be warm and soft, though, and I guess that’s just fine. I’ve started knitting with the yarn a little bit already, and it doesn’t seem so bad. Of course, I haven’t gotten to any of the questionable bits yet, so there’s still time for things to get hideous.

This yarn is uglier than it looks here

Next on the wheel is Night Sky, the December 2008 fiber from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club. I couldn’t decide what to spin next, so I put it to a CPAaG vote, and they told me to go with the superwash BFL. I’ve been wanting to spin this up for a while, but I couldn’t decide between standard 3-ply or a navajo-ply, and being locked into this roving via vote forced me to finally choose. I ended up going for the 3-ply. I split the roving into thirds, and then I just split the thirds into strips of varying thickness, to get a more random, less uniformly striping yarn. We’ll see how it goes.

Aside from those things, I just got back from a trip back to Long Island. It’s been two years since I’ve gone back to visit, but I was really surprised by how normal it felt to be there. I don’t remember ever really feeling at home there when I would go back during breaks from college, but it definitely felt like going home this time. And my family didn’t get on my nerves hardly at all! Amazing. At only 5 days, the trip was entirely too short (this could explain the bit about the family), but at least it was something. We all went in to Manhattan on Christmas Eve, and it was incredibly busy and crowded, but still a fun time. It was L’s first time in Manhattan, too, so that was interesting. Saw the tree, saw a bunch of pretty lights, and we also went to dinner.

The best photo I took that night, I think

It was great to get away for a bit. I haven’t been away anywhere other than short trips down to Chicago since 2007, so even though this was definitely a family visit, it was nice to have some kind of vacation. I think the next vacation I take, though, will have to be something that doesn’t involve visiting anyone. Something where it’s just L and I going somewhere together. It’s about time we took a vacation like that. Of course, there needs to be money for that, which will probably be a long time from now.

So, there’s the more interesting bits of what I’ve been up to in the past two months since I last touched the blog. Not really much to speak of, as usual.