Green

Before Blog Week started I figured that with a week off from talking about my current projects that I would have loads to share once normal service resumed. This was always going to be wishful thinking, but that is my favourite kind of thinking. Due to my seriously irritationg, but all emcompassing need to be working on all the things at once I've made baby steps of progress on everything, but finished nothing. Except for this:

It's the pink sparkly yarn which I proclaimed was nearly finished here back in february. This was not entirely a lie, I did in fact finish plying the yarn, I skeined it and washed it and became the very proud owner of some incredibly squiggly yarn. I think to describe it as a wee bit overplied would demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the word 'wee', so another go around the spindle was deemed necessary. Obviously I had to wait a couple of weeks, just to make sure it wasn't going to magically unply itself a bit, but eventually I just got on and did it myself. Even now this yarn is still very tightly plied, but I don't have the heart to stick it back on the spindle a third time so it will have to do. There is just over 100m there, not sure on the weight yet.

Other than that, I have just begun to ply the first half of the merino tencel. I'm plying this a lot more loosely than the pink stuff and have no doubt that this will therefore be totally underplied. Hopefully by lowering my expectations this will turn out better than I hope!

And because I don't have enough on the go I have also started spinning some new fibre I got from World of Wool last week. It's an intriguing blend of merini bamboo and soybean, which I have to say looked way more purple on my screen when I ordered it, but apparently the world wants me to spin green yarn and who am I to argue.

Small triumphs

Last weekend was crazy busy, I even took Friday off work and still felt like I had no time to sit still and just make stuff.  My wedding shrug still looks like a rectangle – albeit a slightly longer rectangle than before – and I still have many spindles half full of singles with no friends to be plied with.  There is one exception though,

 This is a teeny tiny skein made from that little bit of green fluff that came with my FeltStudioUk the other week.  I’m really pleased with it, even though it is only wee.  I didn’t bother to measure it and I haven’t checked to see what weight it is yet, but it looks like yarn and seems nicely balanced so I’m happy.  The more eagle eyed among you may notice that I’m posting about this finished yarn, yet I have made no mention of the sparkly pink stuff that was so very nearly finished a few posts back.  Well, I finished plying it, washed it and then it became very clear that my plying had been a little overenthusiastic.  A little trip back round the spindle to remove some of the plying twist is very much in order.  However when it is done I shall have just over a hundred metres of sparkly loveliness and I have most certainly learnt an invaluable lesson about plying twist.

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.