Happy Valentine's Day

May yours be as warm as, well, a handknit sock resting uneasily close to the jaws of a kitty:

Coffeeboy thought that Juniper would make an ideal background for the sock. Juniper thought the sock - and my handspun yarn nicely wound into a yarn cake - would make an ideal lunchtime plaything.

Luckily, as the camera indicates, she had plenty of supervision, and no yarn, WIP-socks, or cats were harmed in the making of said photograph.

I've been a bit of an MIA-blogger lately. Last week, I visited my academic home back in New Jersey, taking along the handspun sock yarn and turning it into what you see above. I met with friends, advisors, and lots of library books. My trunk was noticeably heavier on the long, 10-hours-plus drive home. I even made it into New York City to visit an archive, always fun after spending a while in the small-town mountains!

I find it interesting how the sock's colors are spinning up. I would never have guessed that it would have a large chunk of red like that, and be so mutedly tweedy elsewhere. The yarn is a pleasure to knit with, though, not only because it feels nice but because I made it all by myself! I decided to reinforce the heels with some mohair, or rather, with some Kidsilk Haze, to be precise. Believe you me, my heels cannot wait to slip into that softness!

Well, regardless of whether or not you celebrate this commercially-induced festival of sugary-sweetness, I do hope you get to feel a bit of the fiber-love either way!

For love of sock yarn

Remember how I said I'd made sock yarn? Well now I have pictures! I'm pretty tempted to let the pictures express how very, very excited I am to have made fingering weight yarn that's enough for socks!!

The Fiber:

4 oz. BFL fiber from The Painted Sheep, in the Dublin Bay colorway

The Fiber, unfurled

I divided this in half lengthwise, and then for half A I split it again, for half B I split it lengthwise four times, following a trick I saw on Ravelry about making space-dyed roving into barberpole-striped yarn.

(Click to make any of these bigger in Flickr!!)

Spinning the fiber:

All plied up, it overflows from this bobbin said to hold 4 ounces:

What it looks like washed and dried:

All bundled up as a pretty little skein:


What we have here is 380 yards, 4 oz., fingering weight. It's not superwash, but it sure sounds like sock yarn to me!

I think I'm in love. I'm half tempted to pull out the sock needles right now and cast on to watch this yarn make socks! The other half wants to stare at it, squeeze and pat it. It's soft. It's squishy. It's enough for socks. I'm a happy, happy spinner. I think I'll hang onto it a bit before turning this FO back into a WIP.

As we close this week and come to the weekend, I only hope you find something fibery that makes you quite this happy!

Handspun yarn or rejected writing?

As I considered my options this afternoon, I decided I'd rather tell you all about my latest spinning news than spend too much time worrying that an article submission I sent out a couple of months ago was essentially rejected for not having enough postmodern theory in it. Actually, they didn't reject it outright. They wanted me to revise it based upon a whole lot of theory I'm not entirely familiar with, and I'm not at all sure I want to write the article they want to read! Instead, I think I'll try it with another journal! On the bright side of the schoolwork, though, I have finished a draft of a chapter for the dissertation and will send it off to my advisor soon!

I've been procrastinating on showing you my latest bout of spinning, which occupied me from January 4 - sometime last week, at which point I sent it off to its intended recipient, Greta_Jane, for a belated birthday present. I haven't been showing you many pictures of this spinning because I didn't want her to see too much of it (and she tells me she liked what she saw when I let one little image slip through).

What you see here is about 550 yards / 8 oz. of Louet Corriedale fiber in the colorway "warm wine." It worked out to be about worsted weight. Although it wasn't as even as I'd hoped it would be (it never seems to be, once it comes to plying), I was quite pleased to see that the yarn turned out pretty light and fluffy, not nearly as dense and tightly spun as my previous yarns have been. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this!

The first picture is more true-to-color. I had a really hard time getting good close-ups of the yarn that weren't either entirely blurry or entirely washed out from the flash. This one will have to do.

I also managed, over the past few days, to spin up 4 oz. of yarn that, once it's dry, will be worth of the esteemed title "Sock Yarn." At about 17-19 wraps per inch, it ranges between sport and fingering weight, and has enough yardage for socks - 380 yards! This accomplishment, my friends, is a big milestone as a lover of socks and spinning! But you (and I) will have to wait until it dries to see pictures.

I thought I lost the sock love

I've been having a problem with socks lately. Specifically, socks using those hand-painted yarns I often love so much.  I mean, just take a look at this one. 

This one, folks, is supposed to have a pattern. A pretty pattern called "Laburnum." (It's in the Sensational Knitted Socks book, a 5-stitch pattern).  You can see some examples over there at Flickr. But my sock, it does not have a pattern. Hence, it's been frogged.

Or there's this one, Cascading Leaves. Again, check these out. See those nice little leaves? Now look at this:

Ugh, right? OK, it's not that bad, but it is a little bit, well, blotchy. I haven't quite frogged this one, but I'm tempted.

In desperation, I pulled out some Koigu last night, a nice, reliable handpaint. A colorway, I should add, that hadn't worked well with a pattern involving cables and lace. You'd think I'd have pulled out a nice, and definitely reliable solid color. But no, I decided I wanted to try this particular yarn. After all, it's blue and white and makes me think of winter sunsets. After a bit of poking around on Ravelry, I thought that the Hedera pattern might have just the right amount of interest, but I wasn't so sure about the whole handpainted business. I gave it a shot last night. This is what I found:

I like it. In fact, I really like it. Color me surprised, hand-paint me amazed! I think what you see there must be my personal record for the most sock knit in one evening yet! Thank goodness, my sock love hasn't, as I had feared, quite left me yet.

Handknit and handspun

Hey guess what everyone! It worked! I knit something with yarn that I spun! 

Remember this bit of overspun, blue tweediness?

Well, with it I made a hat!!

Pattern: Tweed Beret from Interweave Knits Winter 2006
Yarn: My Own Handspun!!
Needles: Size 7 in DPNs and various circulars
Time: About a week

The overspun tweediness of the yarn ended up working out really well for the pattern. I also had the perfect amount of yarn: just a tiny, smaller-than-a-ping-pong ball's worth at the end. I was surprised; I'd thought I'd have too little yarn, but no, it was all fine! It was a big tough on my hands: very little stretch to the yarn and therefore not the nicest to knit with. I also could have made the hat a bit floppier.  It's pretty thick yarn, and was nice and toasty when Coffeeboy took this picture yesterday during a snowfall.  Overall, though, I really like how it came out and am terribly excited that my yarn actually "worked"! 

I have another FO that I've been forgetting to post: Coffeeboy's socks. I finished these while we were in Colorado, a few days before New Year's - the last FO of 2007.

Pattern: Retro Rib socks from Interweave's book Favorite Socks
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Pioneer, 2 skeins
Needles: size 1, magic-looped
Time: Nov. 2007-Dec. 2007

I really enjoyed this pattern; the socks were easy to knit and the ribbing controlled some of the pooling of the yarn. Coffeeboy seems to like them too! I "gave" him the yarn as a graduation present, with the promise that they'd become socks, and I finally have kept that promise!

I've been spinning a lot lately, as you might have seen in that last post. For the past almost 2 weeks I've been spinning 8 oz. of red, "warm wine" yarn. It's amazing how much longer it takes when I'm really trying to do things right and spin more even, consistent singles!  Last night I plied it onto 2 bobbins; today I need to take that off the bobbins and finish plying the yarn, probably a bobbin and a half. Then I will have a spinning FO to show you, too!

January's Effects

January has a way of doing things to me. You might guess that what happens in January is hibernation, the effect of darkness, the quiet of the snow. Instead, I often feel a sense of things moving and shifting, as if on some level, I must be able to detect the after-solstice lengthening of the days.

Maybe I'm thinking about all this because a week ago a very good friend converted religions and entered a new decade of life, all in the space of a weekend. Somewhere in there, my talk of spinning into a new phase of life must have got me thinking about the deeper things in life that only rarely write about on this blog. Or maybe it was seeing the past twelve or so years of my life flashing before my eyes, sometimes literally, as I set up my new computer.

Juniper likes the spinning, too, and sometimes checks out the fiber

I'm not kidding about the computer and the flashing. Things really did flash, and it wasn't a trick of the mind or eye. I went quickly through the past seven or so years of digital photos, which is as long ago as my first digital camera. iPhoto for some reason had only imported some of my pictures, so I needed to get it set up in order to download the latest knitting photos. As I merged different collections of pictures together, they literally flashed across the screen. (When there were sets of pictures of the cats, it looked like a movie of squirming and wiggling, I swear). Transferring from Eudora to Mail meant that I had to literally reopen and rebuild files of email that I wrote home during my first semester of college.

So what is it about January? My first January in graduate school, the seclusion of writing papers and exams turned some corner of my brain into a monastic, hermetic retreat. One the one hand, I was totally stressed and anxious (I think I ate nothing but reheat-able, frozen Trader Joe's dinners for two straight weeks I had that little spare time) - and on the other hand I finished the exams, ended a relationship that had gone on far too long, and came out the other side feeling really great. I didn't yet, for that matter, know how to knit, but life was still good.

And now I knit with my own handspun!!

This January, we finally got some snow, just like all the Januarys I used to spend in the northeast. On Wednesday night it finally snowed here in this little mountain town, and the world got really quiet and slippery. I drove home from knitting in Asheville through the snow, doing 25 in a 45 zone so I wouldn't slip down the steep slope. I got out of my car. You could hear the hisses of snow and sleet and ice, but not much else. The world had hunkered down by 10 o'clock at night. I woke up yesterday to the sound of drips and told the cats to look for icicles.

It's supposed to snow again on Saturday!

This January is not the same as all those other Januarys. But the quiet of the snow and the essential aloneness of writing a dissertation makes me pause and think of Januarys past. I wonder what the next ones will bring?

Rest in Peace, Old Mac

Well, it's finally happened. My trusty old iBook has been set aside and replaced. It didn't die in a horrible crash of unutterable proportions, but simply got old, as few computers get to do. Old, slow, cranky, but thankfully never wrinkly.

RIP: August 2001 - January 2008

The new computer's on-board camera

takes a picture of the old,

now shut down, its sleep light no longer glowing. 

Goodbye and Hello. 

That old iBook and I have seen a lot together. It's been my trusted technological companion since August of 2001, a few months after Mac OSX and the new, square, white iBooks came out. It saw during its 7.5 years of service:

• an upgraded hard drive, from 10 to 40 gigs
  
• new memory added
  
• an airport/wireless card added
  
• a new keyboard (after the cats kindly removed the 'E' key)
  
• an external screen when its own became dim
  
• a new battery after the old one failed to charge

It helped me through many projects, fun times, and transitions:

• 1 close call in which I nearly left the Mac universe (I've been a Mac user for as long as I've used computers) for the PC universe, and this Mac kept me so securely in the fold that now I can't imagine using anything else
  
• 1 master's program and over half of a PhD
  
• 2 autumns of PhD applications
  
• seemingly countless term papers and their associated documents
  
• 1 breakup (one which was a very good thing, too)
  
• 1 wonderful spouse (really and truly: way back when he first met me, Coffeeboy was impressed that I had an iBook and that it was running beta software. He figured I must have been a fellow geek of some sort). 
  
• 1 year of wedding planning
  
• 44716 emails stored in Eudora, now successfully and safely transferred to Apple's Mail program
  
• 5 homes in 3 different states
  
• all the photos for a knitting blog, slowly, slowly opening up in iPhoto, and slowly loading in Flickr
  
• innumerable history files in my web browser for knitting patterns and yarn
• the beginnings of a dissertation, and its very many documentary demands

You almost never crashed, old friend. You never lost my data. (I have all my emails going back to 1996, freshman year of college, for example. That's almost an insane amount of memory and data). You would have kept on trucking along, maybe at 15 mph instead of 60, if I had let you.  You got me through a good majority of the previous decade of my life, and I can only hope that my new computer proves to be as excellent a machine as you were, that it can assist me through whatever comes next with just as much ease and style!

Stranded for the New Year

Guess what? I've now fulfilled a childhood dream... of being stranded in the mountains by a snowstorm. Coffeeboy and I spent the new year's holiday with his family in Colorado, and a week ago Friday, we went into the mountains to spend time at their condo at a ski resort. We cross-country skiied happily on Saturday, were joined by friends that afternoon, and snowshoed Sunday morning. As you can see, it was quite snowy! After a leisurely late lunch at a local restaurant, we went home to the condo to pack and leave.

We ended up leaving at about 5 pm, the same time as everyone else heading home from the slopes after Christmas week, in this case, east towards Denver on highway 70. (You might have read something about this on the news a few days ago.) About an hour and 5 miles later, we decided to turn around and call it a night. This was a wise decision, as the tunnels and passes were all closed by the time we returned a half-hour later. Everyone decided a trip to the hot tub to relax was in order, followed soon by a plate of what cheese we had left and simple dinner of pizza.

When we woke up on New Year's Eve, we figured they'd open the passes soon, and we'd leave that morning. But the passes didn't open till late afternoon, by which time it was getting dark, snowy, and stormy--not looking much better than the night before.

This is how I came to run out of yarn for Cobblestone, knitting away the time in a condo at Copper Mountain while the snow, -30 windchills, and 0-degree temperatures kept us inside reading and playing games. Being stranded on New Year's Eve turned out to be not so bad, to put it mildly! I'd happily strand myself there any time, for anything!

Speaking of strands, when we returned to my in-law's house on New Year's Day, I found the remaining yarn for Cobblestone (just a partial ball, a lot smaller than I thought it was) and knit up the rest of the sweater, giving it to Coffeeboy late that evening after weaving in all the ends. But now, it is finished. Except for blocking.

Pattern: Cobblestone pullover
Yarn: Mission Falls 1824 Wool, 15 balls
Needles: KP Options size 6
Time: about 2 months

It was a long trip, those two weeks. Great to see family, and i actually finished a bunch of knitting (the sweater, a pair of socks for Coffeeboy, a hat for my BIL, etc). I'm glad to be home with my kitties, my wheel, and my stash. I'm also looking forward to getting back to normal life. My list of to-dos grew and grew while away, and the amount of dissertating shrank considerably as well. It's time to put my brain to the grindstone once again, and turn the wheel on the productivity in more ways than one. With Coffeeboy off in Salzburg Austria this week for a fancy seminar (paid for by school), I'm sure I'll have plenty of quiet time in which to get caught up!

Happy holidays!

This year December has just flown by. I cannot believe that Coffeeboy and I are leaving tomorrow to visit family for Christmas, and then to visit his family for a belated Hanukah and for New Year's. Is it really that far into December already?

Part of the disbelief, I think, has been caused by the weather. A week and a half ago, it was warm enough to go for a nice hike in our beautiful mountains. The clouds and the light combined to make for a truly eerie backdrop.

Looks a bit like Middle Earth, doesn't it?

This weekend, however, the weather took a turn for the colder, and although it didn't snow (like the forecast said it might) in my little town, on Saturday snow did dust the ground in Asheville where Coffeeboy and I went for dinner and a "Swannanoa Solstice" concert.

I've been knitting and spinning a lot, realizing that the spinning has bitten into my plans for holiday knitting. But, I spun up the BFL from Jessica into about 220 yards. That's enough to actually make something with!

The yarn was still quite unbalanced; I haven't quite figured out how to ply correctly. It also didn't work out to be nearly as many yards as I'd hoped; at only 220 or so yards for 8 oz, I think I made a pretty dense yarn. Oh well. I'll learn. And thank you all so much for your encouragement of the spinning!

I don't have a picture, but I think last night I did get a balanced yarn! I experimented with some plain fiber of unknown variety, only spinning enough to cover a single layer on the bobbin, and then plied it together, this time really trying not to overdo things. It worked! Let's just hope that when I return to my wheel in January, things go as well and I remember what to do!

Besides spinning, there has been a remarkable amount of Cobblestone, and remarkably little sock progress. Cobblestone has just a few inches of sleeve left before I join it all up for the yoke. Fun stuff! But now the crunch is on, and I need to finish those socks up before I can really focus on Cobblestone!

Thankfully, I have until after Christmas for the little red sock, and the brown/blue socks are for Coffeeboy, so that is a bit more flexible as well.

Now, the question remains, what knitting should I take with me this holiday trip? And how much work? I'll have 2 weeks worth of knitting and working and seeing family, so the question always returns, just how much is realistic? So many possibilities!

A new decade

Now that I've entered a new decade, do I feel older?

The short answer is no, not really. Turning 30 isn't that bad (despite what I've decided is a new sympathy for people trying to read menus in dark restaurants!). Many of my friends have had a lot of 3-0-angst, and I haven't suffered the same. It seems that those who have had angst have had things they're still looking for in life - feeling like they've found a career, buying a house, finding a spouse, having a kid(s).

I've never felt pressure to do any of these by a certain point, but making progress on 3 out of 4 probably eases the transition into this new decade. Turning thirty and thinking about it from this perspective does give me renewed sympathy for those who have already turned that corner (or will do so soon) and are still looking to add to that list, fill in those blanks. I have it pretty good, I think, and I'm really thankful for that. I can only wish the same happinesses for all my many friends! I'm not so sure that I'll be quite so calm when the next decade comes around - but that's not for a long while yet, thank goodness!

What did I do to celebrate, you ask. Coffeeboy and I spend the past weekend in Atlanta, celebrating in the "big city" with my/our friend Greta_Jane at Ivory Needles. We went out to eat at a yummy restaurant, went for a hike, and generally had a good time hanging out. (I'm not sure that GJ's wall appreciated being drilled into, though. We tried to put up a shelf, and in the manner of most housing projects, found that the house provided its own complications - this time in the shape of strange plaster and metal door frames. Yikes!)

My actual birthday was pretty quiet. I spent it at home, working, spinning a very little bit, and starting to listen to holiday music.

I did get some nice gifts, including a reminder that the wheel is a birthday present:

Isn't that sweet?
My wheel was all decked out in pretty blue bows!

As for those packages that kept arriving on Friday, one of them was indeed fiber - 8 oz of reddish Corriedale. And another package was indeed a book from Amazon - Spin to Knit. Thank you, honey!

The third package, it turns out, was for me; it was just vastly larger than anticipated! I'd ordered what I thought was 8 oz. of fiber from Paradise Fibers (I typed "8" in the quantity, which to me implied "per ounce.") They sent me 8 bundles of 8 ounces each - four whole pounds of fiber, apparently by mistake! After a few thoughts of what I could do with 4 pounds of fiber (make an absolutely huge amount of yarn, enough for a couple of sweaters), the good Samaritan in me won out, and I called them to arrange to return the extra 7 bags. Because really, I'm not at a point in my spinning where I want 4 pounds of the same thing! Oh my! In return they've given me a 10% off coupon for my next order, yay! The only problem is... the UPS truck never arrived to pick up the box. I guess I'll need to call them again, hmm?

Fiber on Friday

What's this? Fiber Friday? I have some finished yarn photos for you! It's as if it were "Fiber Friday" or something!

But first, a word to the non-spinners. A long time ago, before I decided I wanted to spin, I used to read people's spinning posts and feel a bit bewildered by all the different terminology. I felt a bit left behind, if you will. I know it wasn't intentional on the part of those bloggers, and I stuck with them through the spinning (even if I didn't quite read the posts, but simply tuned in for the "oooh, pretty yarn pictures" factor).

So, to the non-spinners reading this, hang in there, this is still a knitting blog, and I sympathize if you're a bit weirded out by the sudden prominence of the word "spinning" in my topic tags. You don't really want to see a few more inches of Cobblestone, though, do you? Because that's all that's happening around here, I swear. Socks? Hats? Other holiday knitting? It's not happening. Cobblestone is on the needles and wants to be worked on, gosh darn it. (I've actually finished the body and started a sleeve, but I don't have a picture. Besides, it would look like a very small version of the body anyways, so my point stands).

That said, how about some fiber?

Thanks for all your hints and suggestions about the overplying of the blue lagoon yarn. I've decided to leave it as-is for now (partially because I lack any easy way to wind a center-pull ball).

Look, a dime shot!

I also spun up all of the not-quite-4-oz. of the "autumn lake" roving. It went really, really quickly, quite possibly because I love the colors. I love how tweedy it turned out. I'm also glad that it's not quite as overplied as the previous skein was.

I don't exactly love that there are only 100 yards; I would have liked something longer. Nor do I like that it's a bit scratchy and scraggly, but that might be because I was playing around with letting the twist eat up the yarn.

Looking at the close-ups, I'm thinking the singles weren't very tightly spun; at least, they don't look that way in the closeups. I wonder if this is why it's scratchy and why there are so many fibers hanging out from the singles? Hmm.

Speaking of fiber, I'm highly suspicious of all the mysterious packages that have arrived at my door in the last half hour. I've seen a mail truck, a DHL truck, and a FedEx truck dropping things off. Good gracious! It's a veritable delivery parade out there. Now I only need to see a UPS truck to collect the full set. You'd think my birthday were on Monday or something, and that I'd be entering a whole new decade to boot!

(My birthday is on Monday, and I'll now have to say that my age is 3x, instead of 2x. I'm going to feel very old, I think. I also suspect I don't get to explore these enticing packages Coffeeboy has ordered until then. One of them, though, has a suspicious Amazon.com marking on the box, and two have really interesting return addresses that I shouldn't have looked at. Bad me! - but this is what happens when one works from home and receives the mail, I guess.)

Happy Friday, all, and have a good weekend!

Overplied!

On Sunday afternoon, I finally felt well enough to sit by the wheel, so I plied up the two bobbins of pretty blue fluff. Indeed, the bobbins hold about 4 oz. of fiber, as you can see from this crammed bobbin!

I then wound the yarn onto my makeshift niddy-noddy, also known as two posts and one beam from my sweater dryer. It bent a bit, but made an excellent substitution for the tool.

That's 119 yards or so.

I had read on the internet (while I was sick and couldn't spin) that it can be OK to overply the yarn, that overplying gets corrected with hot water and whacking. So I decided to go for the overplied side of things. Apparently, though, I took that little tidbit too far! When I removed the yarn, it went sproing! into a mess of coils and overplied yarny goodness.

A soak in the tub, followed by a few very fun whacks against the side of the shower, seemed to remove most of the little coils.

As you can see, it's still quite overplied. I must have been a bit ply-happy when I was at the wheel. I didn't use the plying head, but just a regular bobbin, and the same whorl I'd used to spin the yarn, which made plying go so much more easily. (Until the flyer started sqeaking and I had to clean it, but that's another story). We'll have to work on the plying! In this picture, the yarn is still pretty wet, so I can't give you the pretty all-skeined-up shot quite yet.

I can't decide whether I like it like the overplied look or not. I really like the blue-lagoon colors of this yarn, and I'd like to make a hat or something out of it. It could make a really funky hat as is, or a really nice and lofty hat if it weren't plied so darn much. I'm half of a mind to reply it once it's dry, to get something that looks a little less squished. How, exactly, does one go about replying something?

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

I have a cold. Which means I've been curled up reading old, favorite books (An Acceptable Time, by (the late and beloved) Madeleine L'Engle), collapsing after getting the stuffing started in the slow cooker yesterday, and napping in front of Thanksgiving Day football, occasionally sitting up to knit Cobblestone.

That's about 11 inches. Juniper says "hello," by the way.

Coffeeboy (who's a wonderful cook and who loves to cook, by the way) did most of our holiday preparations, in the end, including: our favorite cheese-nut loaf, orange and white sweet potatoes in the slow cooker, cranberry sauce, and the best yet: pumpkin bread pudding. Oh goodness, that stuff is yummy. It turned out to be all right that we didn't have anywhere else to go after the conference in San Diego, and that we didn't have social obligations here in NC, because of the aforementioned cold.

The conference in San Diego was great, but a little long for those of us who had to present on Friday evening (before the conference really started) and Tuesday morning (after almost everyone had left). I think both Coffeeboy and myself had a wonderful time catching up with old friends and making new ones. We also got to relax in the hot tub at our truly spiffy hotel.

Today I've been feeling a little better, a little more upright and less horizontal. Upright enough, at least, to fill you in on some fiber-news.

First, I took some pictures of my 3rd skein of yarn, the first I made on my very own wheel. I kind of like how some of it's quite uneven and some of it is very even, plus, the fiber really glistens. I'm thinking one day I'll dye this (I've been imagining a moss-green shade.)

Click to make 'em bigger in Flickr...

After that, I decided to spin up some of the pretty blue stuff I bought at SAFF. I worked on that last week before the conference; in fact, I forgot to take a picture of the fiber before I started spinning it. So you'll have to survive with this:

I find it really interesting that the fiber looks so much darker on the bobbin than it does in its unspun form. Any thoughts on why?

Last night I spun up the rest of that fiber, but I haven't gotten around to plying yet. My previous experiences of plying is that it's actually pretty hard work on the feet and legs, and given that don't quite want to be sitting up, I'm not sure I feel like plying right now. But I think this fiber will make a very pretty yarn, and not bad at all for a fourth go-round. More pictures of the pretty blue singles:

Finally, I have some roving to show you. This came from the lovely Jessica in NJ. She gave this to me when I saw her and spun with her a few days before my proposal defense (she let me use her wheel, too!). She dyed the fiber herself, with really gorgeous colors: navy blue, browns, greens, a little purple in there too.

So pretty! Thank you, Jessica!

I also couldn't help but purchase 4 oz of this lovely-colored English Leicester roving from Etsy (The Fiber Station), in a colorway aptly named "Autumn Lake."

Oh dear. Now I can't decide which to spin next, they're both so pretty! I wonder if I'm ready to try for sock yarn? Either of those would make some gorgeous socks! Maybe I should content myself with spinning a consistent and thinner yarn before planning anything dramatic like socks. Hmmm.