Travel

Today my honey of 10 years left town on a short business trip.  In all our time together we have only spent a night apart on a couple of occasions.  This trip will be two nights and there was a flight involved.  So last night I quickly whipped up some knitted luggage identifiers to mark my old suitcase set for him.

knitted luggage id

Safe travels.

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Drumcarding for color

Restarted cardigan

At the rate I’ve been posting, you would think I haven’t been crafting. But no, the sad truth is that I’ve just gotten terrible at taking pictures of what I’ve been doing lately. So as I suddenly remembered to take pics today, here you have a post at last. I restarted my frogged top-down lace cardigan, and it’s going much more symmetrically this time around. I spun some funky art-yarn (not pictured, sorry) with my lovely lincoln longwool locks and some sari silk fibers, and then made two wall hangings (also not pictured, again sorry). What reminded me that I’m a craft blogger and I’m supposed to keep to a regimen of taking photos of my processes and projects, is the absolutely stunning colors that came out of my drum carder last night and today… But I also didn’t take pictures of the drum carder, the carding, or the batts… Again, sorry. The good news is that as I was oooing and ahhing over my beautifully saturate and multi-hued singles, my husband said ‘hey, you should take a picture of that’. Suddenly I remembered that I should have taken some pics earlier in the process. Blogging is hard (no, not really, I just forget sometimes).

Three drum-carded rovings

So here are the three beautiful rovings (when I finally remembered to take a pic I had terrible lighting and a short leash on my uncharged photo device). If the colors are hard to discern, they are blue/light-blue, muted blue/light pink, and blue/purple/bright pink. The fibers in them are largely assorted alpaca that I had dyed blue/purple/green/red with my friend Emily earlier this summer. A dash of mohair and linoln longwool from the same dyebath, some KnitPicks roving for stability and color depth, and a tiny bit of angelina sparkle. Using the awesome Deb Menz Color in Spinning book as a guide, I carded two of the rovings for a subtle blend, and one of them for a blend that should have some long but subtle color variation.

singles on the bobbin

Alright, lousy pics are almost worse than no pics at all. Anyway, I started spinning up the singles from one of the rovings and I am really excited about the color. I’m going to try 3-plying a bit of it for a hat, and then the rest might be left as singles for a bolero ala the Craftsy lace cardigan style. Next time I’ll do better about the pics. Until next time, keep those needles clicking…

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Limitations…

I have discovered a recurring pattern in my knitting hiatuses. Mid-semester every term, I guess I must be too overwhelmed by all the other priorities swirling around me to knit. I have a fair bit of knitting time available to me every day on my commute to and from work (usually either my husband drives or I take the bus). And I have a little tv time most days that I could be taking advantage of as well. But lately, I just sit with idle hands.

And this happens every semester, right around the middle. I have overdue gifts to knit, and fun, easy novelty projects as well, but I guess there’s only so much activity I can handle. Sometimes people see my finished projects and ask “How do you have time to do it all?” The answer is that I really don’t, and sometimes those limitations catch up to me.

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