Invisible tea

I wrote a post all about how my car knocked a cup of tea all over the sock I'm knitting.  When I went to take a photo the sock had dried and no trace of the team was visible.  Good news for the sock, not so great for the post!  Anyways, here's a nice photo of the cat responsible.  Good job she's adorable.

Oops more fibre

Because I am slowly working through my fibre stash, I thought I could do worse than to add a little more to it.  With a wealth of lovely stuff available on Etsy it was a difficult task to choose what I wanted, but in the end I was unable to resist checking out with these bits from Hilltopcloud.

These are lovely batts with merino, mohair and silk.  I love that they are subtle and dark with occasional flashes of purple, I’m really looking forward to these being yarn.  I’m so often drawn to bright flashy colours which can limit what I’d realistically knit with them, but this will be really versatile I think.

 These are little bits of roving with Shetland, merino and tussah silk.  I'm having a bit of a blue thing at the moment, which is quite odd for me, so this is perfect.  I’m anticipating that I will have an empty spindle very shortly, so now I just have to decide which of these fibres I spin up first.

New kit

Yesterday I included a quick pic of some the Yummy Yarns fibre that didn’t get to come on honeymoon with me, although it is clear from the photo that I have now started to spin it up.  I was going to save it for a while, but when I got home from my holiday this lovely IST spindle I ordered a while back was waiting for me.  The next fibre on my list for spinning was an alpaca silk blend, but I only had to spin for a minute to realise that that was going to require a heavier spindle so I swapped to the merino bamboo instead.  I’m enjoying spinning with the spindle, it’s so delicate and refined and it spins for ages and the fibre is spinning up nicely too.

 The other fibre that I did take away with me was a small portion of the merino silk top that I got from Shunklies a wee while back (first blogged here).  I got most of this spun up on holiday and finished it up quickly once we were home and now I have this lovely colourful skein of 4-ply.  It is 68m long and weighs 23g.  I was aiming this to be fairly stripy and it sort of is.  Each section is certainly mostly one colour and I think that the little variations make it interesting.  I’m still rather amazed each time I finish a new skein that I have produced actual yarn that I can actually knit with, once I’ve decided what I want to make that is.

Back again so soon

Here I am, Day 2 of trying to be a better blogger and catch up with everything.  Yesterday I finished with my wedding and the shrug that wasn't, so a good place to pick up would be the honeymoon.  Obviously an important consideration before we went away was which projects I would pack.  Because I was no longer tied to the shrug I thought I'd enjoy some sock knitting, so I packed my plain simple socks which I'm knitting out of some of the first yarn I dyed.  I finished the first sock a while back, but aside from casting on I hadn't worked on the second sock at all.  I'm now ready to turn the heel on that sock thanks indeed to the near apocalyptic levels of rainfall which will forever define my honeymoon!  In all honesty neither of us were at all upset about the weather, to us the honeymoon was an opportunity to drop off the grid, spend some time alone and know that when we woke up in the morning we were free to do, or not do whatever we liked.  It was bliss.

The weather also afforded me plenty of time for spinning too.  I'd packed an ongoing project, which is now finished and will get it's own post later in the week, and as a little treat I'd bought myself some new fibre from Yummy Yarns on Etsy.

Rather nice merino soybean top

Pretty batts full of lots of lovely stuff

 I can highly recommend her shop, the fibre is lovely and I received a wonderful welcome into her group on Ravelry.  After some deliberation I decided to pack the batts to take away with me.  So far I've almost finished spinning up the first one, from one side of the batt to the other so i have three very wide stripes.  Because I could only really fit half of the batt on my spindle this resulted in a bit of jiggerry pokery, winding and rewinding so that I can join the right end of the second spindleful to the first spindleful, I really should think about these things ahead of time.  When I start the second batt I shall be starting from the middle so that when I wind off it will be the right end on the outside.  My problem solving skills know no bounds!

Apologies

I have been a downright sucky blogger of late, I’ve really got out of the swing of things and it really is time to kick myself into touch.  I even have 2 FOs, an event which would normally have me firing up blogger with gusto, but I just haven’t got round to it.  I’ve also started new projects, purchased new things and made plans to get back behind the sewing machine (once I’ve moved the pile of socks that’s in the way) so I have plenty of stuff to write about.  Rather than doing a massive info dump and running out of steam again I think I’ll cover one thing at a time and ease myself back in.

So, first things first.....the wedding shrug, whatever happened to that?  Well, anyone who has clicked the link to my wedding website (that’s the button in the sidebar, helpfully declaring that I have been married for 31 days) will notice that it is absent from the photographs.  This is not because I didn’t finish it, I did.  I finished knitting it on the afternoon before the wedding and duly sewed it all up right away.  I tried it on, it seemed to fit and then looked in the mirror and horror of horrors I just didn’t like it very much!  This is one of those things which worries me most in knitting and luckily doesn’t happen too often.  We spend many hours making these things and then at the end they are just.. meh, it’s disappointing.  However, because I was far too busy worrying about other things this disappointment didn’t last very long at all.  Plus the day of my wedding was absolutely boiling, had I really liked the shrug I would have spent the whole day trying to find an excuse to wear it in weather when I really would have had no business wearing a shrug at all.  I guess everything happens for a reason.