Spinning a Storm

The drop-spinning continues at my house. I bought a small stash of wool roving and have been slowly working my way through it. I'm still knitting, for sure, and am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on a cardigan I'm working on right now, but spinning is so easy to pick up for five or ten minutes throughout the day.

Working third shift, I am blessed to be home to help my husband start bedtime for our son, but around 8:00 or so, I say goodnight, leave my husband to read bedtime stories, and I get ready for work. Once the scrubs are on and the dinner is packed, I have 10 minutes before I have to leave in which to spin.

Undyed wool roving, my second attempt at handspun:

Two plies of pink and one ply of purple, which I spun more tightly:

And some hand-dyed wool, done on the stove with plain old liquid food coloring, tap water, and vinegar:

Spinning is great fun, but there's a little added excitement for me as I watch the colors change gradually, and then again as I wait to see what will happen when the individual strands are plied together.

Mermaid Sorbet

This little gem, which ended up being almost 12 feet long, has been neglected for a week or two because I didn't want to block it. Actually, I had no place to block it due to its enormous, ridiculous size, because blocking on the floor is a no-go with a cat and a toddler. I ended up blocking it in halves on the bed, but I'm not entirely happy with the stitch definition and, when summer classes wind down in two weeks, I'm going to block again.

I really like this tutorial from the purl bee, particularly the part about blocking on a towel that isn't "too linty." It's like they've actually seen my linen closet. . .

Mermaid Sorbet: A Use for Otherwise Unusable Yarn

About a month ago I dyed this yarn with Easter egg dye. The yarn is Knit Picks Bare superwash in fingering (sock) weight, and I used four of the color tablets - red/pink, blue, yellow, and purple - to get a sense of what the colors would look like. The yarn looks gorgeous all wound up like this, but because I didn't make a longer skein for longer color repeats, it will not stripe if I knit it into socks and would probably be a horrible, variegated mess.

My solution: dropped stitches. I'm using the Seafoam pattern from Vogue Knitting: The Ultimate Knitting Book and size 5 circulars (40 inches). I am calling this scarf Mermaid Sorbet because of the colors and the pattern, but I inadvertantly cast on 666 stitches (I needed a multiple of 10 + 6), so I toyed with the idea of calling this project Devilfish.


I've completed two pattern repeats, each repeat being 8 rows, and I think I'll have enough yardage to do two more repeats. As bright and crazy as this yarn is, I really like the longer pieces of color I see because of the multiple yarn overs. In my humble opinion, a dropped-stitch pattern or one with multiple yarn overs seems an ideal way to show off a colorful yarn that doesn't seem suited to many other projects.