There was frenzied excitement.

I've got a lot of new things on the needles. I'm working on a brioche in-the-round neck gaiter. Brioche stitch is my new obsession--it's so squishy!!! I can't really understand why EZ said it couldn't be done in the round, and have lingering doubts that I'm not really doing brioche because doing it in the round seemed obvious. Oh well, it looks like brioche, and it's squishy like brioche, so I don't really care. I'm knitting this with 5 (five!) strands of Jaggerspun Zephyr because I am on a stash busting mission. I'm already panicking about how I'm going to get all my crap back to the US when I repatriate (?), so i'm furiously converting my yarn into stuff which I'll also be bringing home. I'm clearly not solving the problem, but somehow I feel more justified in shipping clothes than yarn. I'm planning to add a second color, but I have more burgandy yarn than the second color, so I'm doing the edges in all burgandy.




I'm also working on the infamous bearded cap. I almost died when I first saw that so I'm making up a pattern as I knit. Also knit from stash Zephyr, 3 strands in this case. (I don't know what the splotch in the picture is, either.)




And I've started another sweater. My friend Steve moved to a far colder climate, so I immediately jumped on the chance to foist some knitwear on him. He agreed I could make a sweater. This project is a spinning stash buster--I had a ton of wool which I haven't been spinning because I've become the cliched 30-something computer-job-holder with a bad back. I haven't figured out how to spin while lying down on my couch (this is how I knit and compute at home). I have some delicious Evilla pre-yarn for a shawl, and when I was reading about how to work with preyarn I found some sites about knitting a sweater with Icelandic unspun. Now, normally people are buying "cakes" of this stuff which has been carded into pencil roving and nicely wound up in a stack, but why not just knit right from the roving bag?!?!? I was literally shaking I was so excited.

My friend wanted a dark green sweater, so I ordered some dye and spent the week impatiently waiting. The dye arrived on Thursday night. There was frenzied excitement. Mistakes were made. I haven't really got the hang of dying yet, and I'm always surprised by the finished product. Really surprised. I don't seem to understand how the colors mix, and what direction they go in if they are darker or lighter than I intended. In this case, I mixed blue and yellow and a bit of black, and came out with roving that was mostly blue, but very uneven, with spots of yellow and spots of black. Not a green to be found. Hmm. The one thing he didn't want was blue. I happen to love the shades that resulted (can't seem to get a decent photo yet) so I'll just use that blue for something for me--I think the variations are going to look awesome when knitting up. Anyhow, I'm now knitting out of my brown roving and will either leave it as is, or try to overdye it when it's done. I'm experimenting with green food coloring on my swatch right now.

This roving is to die for. It's unbelievably soft, and I have refused to spin anything else for some time--I tried other wools, including merino, and also alpaca. But I always come back to this Blue Faced Leicester. I also love the natural brown, which is slightly variegated. I just LURVE it! And it turns out that when you knit with the roving, you get to pet the wool even more than when you spin it. I'm in heaven. I am a bit worried that it will pill like a demon after it's knit up--hoping washing and blocking will lock the fibers in a bit. Otherwise I'll have to buy him a sweater shaver thing....



And, in case you were wondering? No, I don't really have a life! Ha ha. I spend all my spare time reading and knitting. I don't really socialize, and I'm single (and thousands of miles from my family) so my family obligations are non-existent.