Tonight I fly back to the East Coast to see my family for a week and a half.  Some time off work sounds just about right right now.  I’ve been missing them a lot – 2 weeks a year isn’t nearly enough vacation with my family all the way cross-country.  I look forward to a great trip.

I also forsee a trip to Halcyon Yarns on our drive from Boston to Maine (not that I don’t already have plenty of yarn and fibre…).  I’ve had my eye on a weaving kit I saw there last time.  I think it might help answer the question of what to do with all the yarn I’m spinning but not yet knitting.  If only I could get the hang of enjoying less glitzy/fancy fibres so that it were easier to make mundane items out of the results…

No pictures again, but I promise some of the new spindles and their recipients when I get home.

I wonder what the flight attendants would make of me spinning on the plane.  I do have an aisle seat this time.

Wow, there’s so much to update that I don’t know where to start. So tonight we’ll just keep it simple and over the next few days I’ll work on noting down all my recent fibre accomplishments and lessons.

Part of the reason for the looooong gap was that my web host company moved my hosting account to a nice new server (quite sweet of them), but along the way managed to get the contents of the account nearly FUBAR’ed. At first I thought they’d just deleted all my data. I didn’t have time to look into it for a few weeks, so the knowledge that all of it was potentially gone just sat there festering in the back of my mind. Tonight I finally got a few hours to poke around, and seem to have unravelled the issues (many) and gotten this one segment back up. I’ll have to take the time to fix my wiki and a few other sections in the near future.

I’ve got a long and exciting weekend ahead of me, including my birthday, so this will have to do for tonight. It’s to bed for me, and tomorrow I try to pack in 5 or 6 days worth of things I need to do into the single day. Should be exciting :)

It’s been a week of learning new things, and tonight’s accomplishments were heel-turning and Kitchener’s stich.  I made one pair of socks (soft, fluffy ones for my Mom) partway through college, but other than that haven’t really attempted the ‘complication’ of them.  Yes, I’ll knit lace, but socks have been a little daunting.  Plus I tend to abuse my socks and have trouble seeing myself wearing hand-knit ones.

Tonight I overcame this fear and I’ve now finished my first of two in a pair of socks for my sister’s Samantha doll, following the American Girl Sock Pattern by Judy Gibson.  I must say that my first adventure into grafting has gone exceedingly well, and I’m now on my way to starting the second sock.

For anyone else out there overwhelmed by the mysterious techniques surrounding sock-making, I heartily suggest this quick and easy to follow pattern.  The first sock took me about an hour, and the instant results are very gratifying.

I’m finally getting the hang of my drop spindle.  I do most of my knitting with lace and fingering weight yarns, so the larger weights look funny to me.  I’m also a tiny bit compulsive about wanting things to look uniform.  So the drop spindle had been driving me crazy – the yarn was too think, bunched up funny, and in the few places where it was thin tended to kink itself up.

But last night I had a breakthrough.  I took much, much shorter sections of fibre – between 8 and 12 inches long – and I separated it into very thin segments and then pulled those out even a bit further.  It’s coming out as a roughly 1ply fingering weight, which I’m okay with.  And more uniform since it’s easier to judge how ‘thick’ the fibre should be in that amount.  I don’t mind having to graft two pieces together more often.  Plus, I’m getting rid of the think portions that aren’t really twisted at all.

Yay!

I cheated a bit today and went ahead to cast on Wisp – the project I’d intended for January, which doesn’t start until tomorrow.  But that’s what happens when you have a 12 hour car ride!  It’s not a good time to run out of knitting :)

I’m just over half done already.  I think I found something else for the ‘January’ piece…