Stress

I'm not one for stress, I don't enjoy it and I don't thrive off it like some so I try not to do it.  Yesterday the world seemed to have other ideas and I'm stressed about being stressed about things I don't want to stress about.  Marvellous.  However, while all around me were demanding answers about wedding cakes and cars and flowers and all manner of other matrimonial fripperies I had new fibre to play with.  Thank heaven for sheep.....and Etsy!  Cue terrible phone pics - I really need to find the cable to charge my camera!

So pretty...this is a merino and tencel blend which is so soft and smooth I kind of want to sleep on it and the colours are just irresistible.

This is BFL with sparkles, I've only spun merino so far so I thought I'd give BFL a go and these colours are fantastic - even if they do remind me of a shell suit I have in the 80s.  These are both by Daniela of FeltStudioUk and I can heartily recommend her.  The braids came so quickly and she has so many colours to choose from, plus she slipped this in my package too:

I don't know what fibre this is and I would never choose greens to buy, but it is so lovely that I started to spin it immediately - despite needing to finish plying the sparkly pink merino.  Oh well, I guess the heart wants what it wants - and right now any distraction can only be a good thing.

Exciting!

Even though I have been spinning since New Year, I haven't yet made a proper complete yarn to speak of.  Although I did spin a small sample and ply it (blogged here), that one doesn't really count.  As I've bought and made more spindles I've been starting more and more projects and ended up with loads of spindles full of singles, but no finished objects.  Given that this is the way I manage my knitting projects as well, this really shouldn't come as a surprise to me and I probably shouldn't try to fight it.  However, I have actually finished two matching singles and started to ply it last night.

I think I was so enchanted by the sparkles that I was spinning in with this that I just got on with and it will now be my first finished yarn, despite being the fourth one I started.  It's probably only about 20 grams of yarn, so just a little skein, but I already love it, my first born yarn!

A new spindle arrived yesterday, bought from this seller on eBay.  I like it a lot, it's pretty and spins nicely  for a long time.  The fibre I'm spinning on it is the lovely bright merino I got from Shunklies recently.  I've split it in half and I'm going to spin 50g as is, all the colours mixing together and for the second 50g I'm going to try and split the colours up a little and try and preserve some of the bright colourfulness of the top.  And maybe I might sneak some sparkles in there too - for motivation you understand!

Good Thing no.5

I nearly changed the title of this post because every time I look at it I get Mambo no. 5 stuck in my head (the Lou Bega version, anyone remember this?)  Anyways..moving on!  Yesterday I hinted at some luvverly new fibre I have acquired:

On the left is some super dooper brightly coloured merino top and on the right is some wonderful sparkly bits which I will be adding to everything I spin with gay abandon from now on.  Both from Shunklies Etsy shop.  This was my first foray into buying on Etsy and it was a pleasure - although I'm kinda wishing I'd never looked now because there is sooo much stuff I want on there.  I'm going to hold off on spinning the top for a little while until I can decide exactly how I want it, but I have spun some of the sparkle into this candyfloss pink.

You can't really see the sparkle in a photo, but it is there and it makes the magpie in me very happy indeed.

A good list

I'm having a funny old time at the moment, people close to me having OMG Dramaz and the like, so I've been a little preoccupied of late.  However, good stuff has been happening too and because I'm a cheery sort I'll skip right over the crap.

Good thing no.1.  Izzy is much much better now, she actually feels like a cat now rather than a bag of coathangers.  On the flip side she has now turned into a speshul snowflayke princessy nightmare.  Obviously she got a little too accustomed to being fattened up and now we can't even go near the fridge without her shouting at us for titbits.  Sigh.

Good thing no.2.  I won a year's supply of Tetley tea!  Twitter is a marvellous thing you know.  I've been retweeting every Friday for weeks and never thought I'd win, but win I did and when it arrives I shall finally have an answer to the question of how much tea is a year's supply of tea.

Good thing no.3.  I dyed some yarn and it is good.

I've attempted brown a few times by mixing up colours and got something unexpected each time.  This time I used some brown Sugarflair paste which seems to have worked really well.  I used 3 jam jars for this yarn, the brown in one, some pink Silver Spoon food colour in another and some lemon lime KoolAid in the third.  I dunked a corner of the skein in each and microwaved the lot.  In an ideal world I'd have left a little less yarn in between each jar because I think I have too much white but I like it anyway.

Good thing no.4.  Rowan have finally brought out a magazine I like (which is sort of bad because I really don't need to add projects to my queue!) after I stopped my subscription a couple of years ago.  There is even something in there that I might knit for my wedding - although I'll have to get cracking on that one if I want to get it done on time, so maybe not.

And Good thing no 5.... will have to wait until tomorrow when I can take some pics of the really great new fibre I got in the post the other day.  It's worth waiting for, at least it was for me!

Getting better

After a week of worry and puzzlement we finally got a reason for Izzy's illness.  I took her to the vet on Thursday and had to leave her there in the hope that someone could work out why she wasn't eating.  Around 8:30 that night one of the vets phoned up and said that they thought they could feel a small soft mass in her tummy.  We immediately put 2 and 2 together and asked them if it could be an earplug.  After opening her up it was found to indeed be an earplug which she had eaten and was stuffing up her insides.  Given that I had found a nice sicky pile of four earplugs and an elastic band a couple of days before she went to get spayed I should have realised sooner, but because she got ill after having an operation we all got fooled into thinking it was the anaesthetic that did it.  So she is recovering at home, trying hard to grow back all her shaved fur with no idea of how much vet bills are!

Because we have been having to watch her pretty much 24/7 and also because I seem to have some kind of mystery wrist pain I haven't really done much of anything the last few days.  I tried to knit some of Stu's cardigan, but that really hurt so I have been spinning in short bursts just to feel like I'm doing something.  Hopefully in a few days I should have a second length of green yarn to ply with the bottle green I finished a while ago, I haven't bothered to take a picture of this because it is quite boring, even if I do say so myself.  My black white and grey stripy stuff is growing slowly, I'm really enjoying the striping so I think I'll probably do a lot more yarns like this in the future.  Here's a little piccy, you can't see the white bits but you can see the other stripes.  Now I just need to think what to do with it when it's done.

Busy with Izzy

Once again it's all about the cats today.  Little Izzy continues to be poorly and now has not voluntarily eaten a thing since Friday.  We're off to the vet again tomorrow, but until then we are working hard to get enough food in her to keep her going.  This has involved a few scratches and lots of flying tuna.  Stinky.  This is really frustrating for us, but mostly for Billie, especially in the mornings when we go off to work and leave her effectively on her own with no one to play with.  She's been quite well behaved but I can see that her pent up energy is making it a struggle to be good.

In the midst of all this we have managed to book our wedding.  It's happening in June, so once Izzy is better it will be all hands to the pumps to try and get that properly organised.  We are going for a fairly laid back affair so hopefully it shouldn't cause us too much stress, but those sound like famous last words to me!  So with everything else going on I've not really had much time for craft.  I did finish spinning up two very small bits of fibre that came free with one of my new spindles.  I thought I'd spin them on their own and then ply them together just so that I could give plying a go really.

Not great, but not terrible either.  there is a small amount of the fibre left as one of my plies was a lot thinner than the other and I'm probably going to spin that up so that I can try out chain plying.  Chain plying preserves the colour order of singles and my latest projects is striping from black to greys to white so I'd really like to chain ply that instead of relying on 2 singles with matching stripes.