Oh, that's just swell...

I have been buried in crap for the past little while. Both figuratively and literally, unfortunately. Long story short - on Tuesday, we had the plumbers truck parked outside our house. In the afternoon, we had the "Disaster Enviro-Kleen" truck. I won't go into details, but let's just say that we're considering sueing the previous owners for serious lack of maintenance...and that the plumbers RAN when they were done with our pipes. The upside is that after telling this story to some friends, we've had some guests cancel their impending summertime visits out of sheer terror of what possible calamity might overcome them here. So, the basement smells like thyme atm (the professionals use a cleaner derived from thyme, who woulda thunk it). And I've been playing catch with Mr. Munchkin's stomach contents since Sunday, so forgive the lack of chipper uppityness in the post.

Add to that the crushing news that Sweet Georgia is going on hiatus and will not be dyeing anymore sock yarn, and you have one seriously pissed Ninja. So, I'm going to be taking part in an upcoming co-op for Henry's Attic yarns, and will be dying my own sock yarn in the future. Self-reliant knitters of the world, unite!

Beware the Stair...

So, last night - spun with a vengeance to get this baby off the bobbins. I tell you, anyone who handspins sock yarn is a special kind of crazy...it takes forever to ply.

As you can see - despite halving the roving (weighed and everything!), it still made for some whacked-outtedly different halves. Different amount of roving, different colours...I was hoping originally to have the two halves match so that the yarn would do this lovely gradual gradiated thing. But t'was not to be, apparently.

There are colours that plied together that make my inner interior decorator freak out (olive green and pink, for example - that particular combination reminds me of things that my girly-girl militantly lesbian ex-roomate would have screeched at me for even thinking of putting together - remind me to tell you about her sometime. She's the one who would spout ridiculous things like 'no white after labor day' and 'blue and green ought not be seen [together]' - but I'm slowly trying to eradicate such idiocy from the crevaces of my brain.) But there are other colour combinations in this yarn that just seem serendipitious and are just lovely. I'm not sure what the hell the socks that I knit out of this are going to look like, but what the hell...the wool's pretty as heck - how ugly could it be? (Famous last words)

Had a lovely morning coffee and cake with Ms. Frozen Extremities - and we had a nice long talk about spinning wheels and the vagaries of spinning silk and other such oddities. And it's a good thing that I seem to have gotten all that spinning out of my system...as I fell down the stairs today, banging and bruising a good portion of my back. No more spinning for me until I can actually reach for the cookie jar without wincing. *sigh*