Setting the twist

(excuse the rubbish photo), and also marvelling over how the Xandermog can go from FULL ON PESTER mode to fast asleep, you-can’t-wake-me in under five minutes flat.  Still when the result is this little face:

N'awwww!

how can you complain?

Other than that, I’ve also been (still) working on the “Gap Year Travels” Travelling Woman shawl… and I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but I’ve called my particular version of it Gap Year Travels because the colourway of the yarn I’m knitting it in is called Byron Bay.  Which is somewhere I visited while travelling in Australia on my gap year.  Anyway, I’ve nearly finished the shawl – ten rows or so to go, and I don’t think I’m going to have enough of the yarn left.  Fortunately, I do have some solid blue that goes with it well enough that I can use it to finish off.  I hope!  If that doesn’t work, well, I put in that lifeline, so it’ll be easy to rip back without dropping any stitches.  If a bit of a nuisance.  But then I’ll definitely have enough yarn to finish off the edging chart.

In other news, marmite rice cakes are delicious.  That is all.

Tomorrow is another busy day, so I’m off to bed now.  I’m expecting to sleep well!

This is how much I already had spun:

and this is the remaining fibre, before I started spinning today:

Onwards!

The first thing I’m spinning are two similar, but complementary, colourways from Limegreenjelly.  Actually, everything I’ll spin will be LGJ, since that’s all I have!  I’m spinning each of these into singles, then plying the two together. I think it’ll look nice.

I’ve also been seeing how I can do on the Monthly Scavenger Hunt on Flickr.  This is my first month, and I didn’t get something for all twenty items, but I managed to do sixteen, so that’s not a bad start!

Mosaic of June Scavenger Hunt photos

1. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, 2. Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking, 3. Call the fashion police!, 4. Veteran, 5. Bubbly, 6. Reflecting, 7. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, 8. Nightlights, 9. Prized Possession, 10. Belly up, 11. Desolate, 12. Walkabout, 13. The north wind doth blow, 14. Microcosm, 15. An elephant in the room, 16. Born to be wild?

So, what next on the blogging front?  Now that I’ve managed to maintain blogging through June, I don’t want to just stop again.  The Tour de Fleece is coming up, so I think I’ll plan to post an update on how I’m doing each day of that… which will mean it’ll be very spinning-centric around here for a couple of weeks.  I dare say I’ll ramble about other things though.  I can only say “today I span such and such a thing, here’s a photo” so many times!

Happily, I’ve solved the missing post button (and tags and categories areas) problem in the edit screen.  Of course I went and did all the standard things first, like disabling all my plugins.  And then it occurred to me to try changing the screen back to the default 2 column view, instead of the 1 column I had it set on.  Oh look, there were the missing areas.  I’ve now rearranged and reset it back to the way it was, and all is well.  Hoorah!

I’m going to see if I can get a bit more done tonight before I go to bed.  I’m still on a little bit of a sci-fi high from the new Doctor Who episode / special tonight, “The Waters of Mars”.  Can’t wait til the next one at Christmas!  But I need to wind down a bit more, so a bit of podcast listening and spinning should do the trick.  Hopefully, I’ll get these singles bobbins finished and then plied within the next couple of days.  I might use the remainder of my birthday money to get a niddy noddy, too.  That’ll make winding the finished yarn back off the bobbin much easier.

As you can see from the collage picture, the original fibre was turquoise, navy, and red.  I rather like the way the colours blended, both in the spinning and plying process, to give a blue-purple final yarn (with bits of red).  The fibre is Limegreenjelly BFL … and I don’t know the name of the colour.  Anybody have any suggestions what I could call the finished yarn?

It was a lovely yarn to spin with – not as soft as the merino I’m using now, of course, but I think that was good since I was trying to spin it a little thicker, and since I’m still learning.  It came out bulky weight once plied, by the way.  The one in the last post is aran weight.  The meino should be lighter weight – perhaps DK after plying?

This fibre (Forest Fibres Corriedale Top) came with the starter pack I got with my drop spindle, but this is spun on the spinning wheel.  I spun about 50g of the navy and 50g of the turquoise, then plied the two colours together.  Ta-daa!