Everything's a work in progress

I was fortunate to have an entire week off work for Thanksgiving this year and IT WAS GLORIOUS. You are going to get tired of hearing me advocate for a full week off from now on. I'm hoping I can reasonably use vacation days to do that in future, non-pandemic years.

During the holiday week, I only finished one project (the tubular doublweave bag) - but I started several. 

In knitting news, I'm pleased to report that I am knitting with my own handspun. Earlier this fall, I embarked on a project in which I measured the WPI (wraps per inch) of ALL my handspun stash and entered it in Ravelry. This allowed me to know if the yarn was roughly fingering weight, sport, DK, etc. Knowing that really helps me match my handspun with patterns and turn them into projects. 

I was able to match this large amount of gradient handspun with the Pool Drops shawl pattern. I have 938 yards of this 2-ply gradient yarn that I spun in 2018. The pattern calls for 794 - 840 yards, but it's the kind of piece that can keep going until you want it to stop. I've just finished the first cake of yarn and the gradient is pleasing me!

The lace section has a few rows which require more attention, but most of them are quite easy... and the garter stitch sections are completely mindless. This project is the exact amount of "challenging" that I need right now (which is a little, but not much). 

In spinning news... I sort of lost my spinning mojo over recent weeks. Honestly, I think some of it has to do with the lack of color in the Breed School 2.0 shipments. I couldn't get excited about sampling the Southdown fiber that arrived in late October... partly because I've spun Southdown before, and partly because it's just so white. I finally told myself that it's okay not to sample this month and I could just spin it the way I wanted to spin it. I'm doing a pretty fine singles and plan to make a 3-ply yarn that should end up being fingering or sport. Here's a boring bobbin shot:

You can see I'm cross-lacing on this spin - that gets me the right amount of take-up for this fine yarn. It's a way to extend the capacity of my Ladybug.

Finally, I spent some time warping up the Flip loom last week. I had these beautiful colors on hand from an order I made in the summer.

When I selected these colors, I had in mind that it would be good to make a "do-over" version of these towels I made on my 15" Cricket back in 2017. You can't get a big kitchen towel out of a 15" loom. Learning that was sad. But the colors still please me today:

I thought about repeating a very similar pattern - white background with edge and end stripes in the colors - but in the end, I decided I wanted MORE COLOR and less white. (I know white is a color, but you know what I mean.) I did a little swatching on this tiny loom, which made me realize I just wasn't feeling the white right now.

So I warped up some Fibonacci stripes and am going to wing the weft as I go. This is a LONG warp (4.4 yards) and I have enough to make 4 towels. I wanted it to be easy, colorful weaving for the holiday break, and I think it will be. It's all just plain weave. Here is the warping shot (note the ever helpful Shakespeare textbook from college):

And here is the first towel in progress. It's so nice to be able to sit down at the loom and just work some plain weave in a soothing color. It is JUST want I need right now.

I hope you are getting what you need out of all your fiber pursuits. I am grateful that I can create just to make myself happy. What a gift!