Knit Sisters

We got out of school today for the Christmas break.  Woo hoo!  Twelve happy days of freedom:  knitting, spinning, dyeing.  Oh, and I guess Christmas is in there too.

This evening I took stock of my ongoing projects that I’d like to work on over Christmas break.

                                    The sherbet socks.  I’d like to actually finish these, because I have a new pair for Rob waiting in the wings.

                                               The black and white superwash roving.  I’m close to done with the second bobbin, and then I need to ply.

                                  Blue Bamboo.  There’s not much to say about this, except “Get to work!”

                                        The colored Romney fleece.  Comb, comb, comb.

                                      The dark brown double-coated fleece.  See above.

                                              The stranded yoke sweater.

Oh, and I’d like to do some experiments with dyeing roving and yarn, too.

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.  Can I get it all done?  Or at least a bit of everything?

Ah, the holidays.

It’s been quite a week.  Without going into the sordid details, I’ll just say that I’ve learned anew the truth of the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.”  And now I know this truth anew as well:  “Do me once, shame on you.  Do me twice, shame on me.”  I don’t intend to get done again.

It’s at times like these that I really appreciate my fiber enterprises as a way to disengage from work thoughts, refocus my mind on something constructive and creative, and relax.  I’m the kind of person who needs to actively remind myself that there’s way more to life than work, and working with fiber does that for me.

I got fired up this week about working with some of my naturally-colored fleeces, so I did some combing last night.

 

This is a grey/light brown fleece which I bought about a year and a half ago.  I finally got it all washed this summer, but just began combing it last night.  Isn’t it amazing how different these colors are?  They really did come from the same fleece. 

 

Wool is astounding.  (When I combed these, I took them over to Rob.  “Look at this!”  I said.  “Look how different these colors are!  They’re from the same fleece!”  “Hmmm,” he said.  Yes, it’s true.  I am a fiber dweeb.)

Then I worked on some black Shetland which I also bought a year and a half ago.

 

(It’s hard to take a good picture of this wool, because it really and truly is black.)  I have almost all of this combed, yet I haven’t started spinning it.  It’s such beautiful wool that I want to be sure about what I’m doing with it before I start.

It’s starting to get cold here.  I need my hat, coat, and mittens when I walk Hugo in the morning.  In honor of Ellen’s first foray into stranded knitting, I dug out this UFO that I nearly finished late last spring:

 

A stranded hat from a pattern in 45 Fine and Fanciful Hats.  This is a good example of what I was talking about the other day; to make this hat I dug around in the stash for single balls of wool that were about the same weight, going more by color than anything else.  The dark brown is handspun, naturally-colored wool from a sheep named Cinder.  All the hat needs is some kind of finish on top (in the book she makes little stuffed bobbles for the tops of the hats–pretty nifty) and a good blocking.  Maybe a couple of ends worked in, too. 

These hats are great fun to make, and if you have a good stash they don’t even cost anything.  (Since I already bought all that yarn, now it’s free.  See?)

Have a good weekend, everybody.  The Knit Sisters will return, renewed and refreshed, next week!