Emily’s Knits

I just finished my second spindle of Fairy Wings singles.  The last one was ~81 yards when plied and I expect this to be around the same.  We’ll find out tomorrow.

We seem to have matching colours at the moment!

We’re working on Missy being able to control the entire drop spindle by herself without having the weight of the yarn changing so much.  She’s getting there, and we’re both having lots of fun :)  It seems the biggest rough spot left is grafting on a new piece of fibre.  Today she learned to wind an Andean Bracelet, and then did the second two all on her own perfectly.  She’s still stopping the spindle to draft, but I think she’ll get it all working together soon.

Missy is using the Royal Gem spindle I bought her from Dragoncraft.  In these pictures she’s spinning SarasTextureCrafts‘ merino/tussah mix in the Dawn colourway.  It’s beautiful to work with, though perhaps not the easiest thing to have started with.

Today was also a siblings-lunch-out after her orientation program ended.  I’m around so little (which definitely makes me sad) that I treasure all my time with my family.  It can be very tempting to move back to the east coast just to be closer to everyone.  Well, all except my friends, who are steadily immigrating to the Bay Area.

After my long nap this morning to recover from a mostly-sleepless overnight flight cross-country, we had a nice afternoon.  My little sister and I played with drop spindles for a while – turns out an elementary school teacher of hers is a knitter and had brought in some spindles and wool to show them earlier this year – and she made great progress.

Then most of the house headed out to a local deli to pick up subs (they were delicious, I’ve missed them) and eat them in the park behind the library, where a group of local college students was performing Shakespeare’s As You Like It.  We showed up a little late so luckily I already knew some of the plot…  They did a great job, though the littlest one was frustrated by her lack of ability to understand them and headed into the library to read.

Even if she’s not into Shakespeare yet having a little sister who wants to read all the time still makes me tremendously proud.  She’s headed into 6th grade, and read over 150 pages during my video conference with work this afternoon!