Must Be Monday

Otherwise known as apparently not a good day for getting things done...

Work started last week, and the weather was gorgeous. Today, not so much. It went from cold and overcast on arrival to cold, windy and raining shortly after we got to the first site of the day. We stuck it out for a couple hours, but finally admitted defeat with the place half-finished, and drove back to the shop (with the heater on full blast). Everything I was wearing was wet enough to need changing when I got home. Oh well, I'm dry now, and at least gardeners have the option to stop for the day, unlike mail carriers or the people who change advertising signs, both of whom I saw working outside today.

All right, so free day, what to do? I noticed the blue yarn in the sweater for my cousin's baby was bleeding colour onto my fingers when I knit, so I wound the yarn into skeins and washed it. Apparently the bar of laundry soap I used wasn't a good idea, because the yarn is all patchy now and will probably need re-dyeing before use...and since I already have that blue in the trim of the cuffs and sweater body, I will probably have to rip ALL of it out and restart with a different colour combination.

That was a depressing thought, so while I was working my courage up, I decided to sew some of the patches for the quilt square in progress. Got a piece done, corners lined up, and came to the conclusion that how I was lining this section up was wrong and I will have to rip out and redo. Thankfully it was only the first of the four sections with that layout.

I'm starting to sense a pattern here - and it's making me very hesitant to try and get anything substantial done. Maybe the best thing to do with my free day is going to be make a cup of tea, put on a movie, and (sigh) rip out the errant quilting seams, frog the baby sweater, and turn my attention to finding a new colour combination for the latter. Yeah. And with any luck, neither the stove nor the VCR will blow up when I try to use them.

New Projects From Old Stuff

I've been thinking I wanted to do some spinning on my old wheel again. I started spinning some wool on it a while back, but the wool was full of nups (my fault entirely, I thought it was something else when I was carding, and the teeth on the carder were way too coarse). I thought I could salvage it, but the spinning was so tedious that I kept abandoning it. So I just sat down yesterday, took off what was on the wheel and plied it - a small skein of white could be handy.

Then I took out the carder, and a heap of pewter-grey llama fibre. I think the fibre was from the first time I went to Rhinebeck, several years ago. I had washed it, carded and spun and knitted a couple skeins, and wrapped up the rest for later...it's lovely fibre and time it got used. I did get around to picking it all before Christmas. It only really needed one pass on the carder to make it reasonable to spin, happily, since it produced 16 nice little fluffy batts, now rolled up and ready to go. That was most of the afternoon.

And you know what? It's so much nicer to spin than that blasted wool that I have more of it spun already than I had of the wool. I feel so much happier!

The other thing I'm tackling that's been taking up space is some cotton yarn. I had leftovers from a couple baby kimonos made 3-4 years ago, plus some destashed to me, and I thought it might turn into a baby blanket. Knit a bunch of squares and started putting them together, decided I wasn't overly enthused with it, and put it away. But even thought the squares were small, the length of the pieces of yarn in them is long enough, I figure, for a few rows of weaving. So it's all getting frogged and rolled up, and maybe it will be a baby blanket after all - but a woven one instead. And that will clear out a project bag, and keep the yarn from gathering (more) dust. So nice to feel there's progress being made!