Brightening things up a bit

Much as I generally love winter the weather here can currently be described in no other way than 'grey'. Although dreary and drab wouldn't be unfair descriptions either. So when picking new knitting and spinning projects I was clearly looking for something to provide my eyeballs with a bit of a pick me up. From my box of ready to go knitting projects I picked this bag

And from my big bag of fibre

I picked this

The pattern I had matched up with the yarn was Nymphalidea and I'm really chuffed with my choice. The rainbowy goodness of the Drops Delight is set off really nicely by the black stripes. The black yarn is some random Rowan 4-ply I bought on a cone from eBay years ago and I'm really glad to be finally using some of it. The pattern itself is really fun and the little sections make it seem like it is growing really fast. The short rows in it really help as no matter how long the rows get 4 out of 12 rows are 22 stitches or shorter, which is a welcome break as the rows get longer.

I haven't got quite so far with the fibre. There is 200g of South American of which I left 1/3 in white, dyed 1/3 neon pink and split the final 1/3 in half and dyed those bits orange and purple. The plan is to make a 3ply with one white strand, one pink strand and one strand with the orange and purple striping. In my mind this will be nice and bright with a subtle variation, only time will tell if it will work out that way. So far I've only spun a bit of the white, I'll spare you a photograph of that! I had a go at spinning with Cassie in the room, I figured she might be grown up enough to understand that she shouldn't touch. Five minutes later she had head butted the wheel while it was spinning, on purpose, and told me that she wanted to lick it so it went away again. My child is a nut.