Wow.

I haven't posted in awhile. Lots of things have happened. I lost 2 pets, my dog and my lizard. Lizzie (dog) had nerve cancer and was in a lot of pain. It was not treatable and her pain was not managed with any medication. We had her put down. This was in October. I miss her like crazy. Then, on Christmas Eve, Charlie (lizard) died. Losing 2 pets is really hard, especially in such a short timespan. It still gets to me. My cat, Godzilla, was clearly upset by the loss of both. He has no one to hang out with, so he chills with my mom a lot, which is weird. He actually jumps on her lap.

I finished another semester of school. Got a 3.65 GPA, so that's cool. I just finished the first week of this semester. I'm happy because I don't have class on Fridays. I am only taking 12 credits, but they are hard classes. One is a graduate-level biology class. Eep. It seems really cool, though.

Crafty-wise, I am still in my LOOOOONG funk. I took a sculpture class and learned to weld, so that was cool. I ended up with the highest grade in the class. Sweet. Maybe some day I will take some pics of my projects. My instructor was repeatedly telling me that I should consider an art major or minor. That was kind of flattering.

While I was home for the holidays, I didn't spin as much as I thought I would. I guess I like spinning as a de-stresser on weekends. I did spin up this awful roving from Twisted Warp and Skeins. It was like spinning polyfil. Once the singles were done, I Navajo plied it. I like the yarn, it was just a pain to spin. It is full of colorful neps and sparkle in every color imaginable. I think it will become a hat some day. Not anytime soon, though. It is DK/light worsted weight.

The roving.


Singles


All plied up


Also, I made a patchwork yarn. I broke off roughly equal lengths of Sheep Shed mill ends and dyed them with Wilton food coloring. I then split the pieces, since they got a bit felty, and predrafted them out. I made piles of lengths of the drafted fiber. One ply was red, blue, purple, and occasional white. I spun them randomly, just picking pieces out of a mixed pile. The other ply was orange, yellow, and green. I spun these in a repeating pattern. In hindsight, I should have put the white in the second ply. Oh,well. Having the one random strand and one regular strand made for a kind of controlled chaos. I think that it might knit up quite nice. It is sport/baby weight.



I need a better camera. :(

Right now, since I can't have my wheel at school with me, I am working on some superwash merino on my toy wheel spindle. I have never spun on any other spindle. The fiber is lovely and soft and drafts so easily, but it makes my hand really sweaty. That's gross. I'm sorry I told you that. Anyway it seems to be at a fine laceweight. I want to try the Handy Plying technique on it. I hate making a 2 ply normally and I hate splitting singles in to 2 hopefully even segments. We'll see what happens with this stuff.