And We're Back!

Well my imaginary fiber folks, since last we spoke I packed up and moved into Chez Arienna. I got the keys a bit earlier than I expected which gave me a chance to pop over and crawl over the place, get some painting done. I had one moment where I walked into my big (to me), empty house with nothing but a spinning wheel and some knitting for company and I felt so, utterly alone. I got that panicky, I-have-made-a-huge-mistake feeling and was not comforted when I walked barefoot across my yard and discovered a fire ant infestation. Man was I regretting everything.

But then the lovely Cheryle, my Mama Elf, arrived. She brought me an air mattress, flowers, and the rest of my local family to help me paint my house. Somewhere between all the chatter and my newly blue walls, I started feeling a whole lot better about everything.

I felt even better after I'd called the pest control folks. Apparently the county I moved to is just... just ants. All the time. If you check out the county FAQ page it basically sums up to, "The ants are here to stay and I, for one, welcome our new ant overlords." So I've signed up for a lifelong battle against ants.. but fortunately the fire ants are gone now and there's no sign of carpenter ants. So that's that!

I still have piles of unpacked boxes but I'm getting my craft room and goodies back together. This past weekend I finally unpacked the dyes and got to work, putting a couple of pretty new Corriedales up for sale in the shop:

I also *drum roll* finished my homespun February Lady. :D I'll talk about that on a separate post but, man! I'm just so proud. I finished her last week and since I've been halfheartedly working on Jaime's socks. I've just finished the instep decreases on those and have nothing left but a couple miles of foot knitting and a couple toes.

I spun up some merino... First I spun this lovely, beautiful, sparkly purple-grey stuff from my talented friend Julia, you can find her store here. This was a bit of a challenging spin for me because it had some texture in it and I'm too much of a control freak to tolerate that. So instead I paused and worked out each bit of texture and produced the softest, squishiest heavy fingering I've ever touched.

Now I'm not a huge fan of purple but it turns out my friend Christian is, it's is favourite colour. And this particular purple has such a subtle hue that I think we can work it into a fairly masculine scarf for him, using the herringbone stitch. Unfortunately.. I've only got around 325 yards of heavy fingering / DK and that won't make much of a scarf unless we abandon all pretenses of masculinity and go straight for the lace. I experimented a bit, laying it next to some different shades and I decided it might work if I did some stripes with black. And what luck, I had bought 3 lbs of black merino from the wool processors up at the Maryland Sheep & Wool!

I spun up a similarly sized skein but.. oh, boys and girls. The differences between these two fibers is night and day. The black merino is stiff and wiry and rougher against my skin than Romney. I'm really incredibly disappointed. I've given it a wash so far with Soak and a little conditioner - it left a bunch of grey in the water. I'm not sure what else to do because I've got 3 lbs of the stuff and if it all turns out this awful, that's money right down the drain.