Tread(l)ing Water

Dudes and dudtettes, I am projectless. I have totally given up on Rogue for the time being. The hat I started to knit out of Suede was so horrific I doubt even Mary-Kate Olson would wear it! My "So-Called Fugly-Ass Not-Long-Enough-So-I-Should-Probably-Just-Rip-It-Out-Anyways Scarf" is riding around in the bottom of my backpack untouched. The tomato orange baby sweater from Easy Knits for Cherished Babies is bo-RING and I'm almost disinterested enough in it to allow Heidi to continue playing with it in her quest for total yarn domination. I should really do a post with pictures of each one of my boring and failed projects, so y'all can see how not-lying I am.

In lieu of knitting, I have been spinning. I have a Corriedale fleece that I bought at the Crossfire Hill Farm sale that I have split into four distict tones from light gray to almost-black. My goal is to Andean-ply it into a DK or light worsted weight yarn and then make something like Jemima or the Union Square Market Pullover. I want to start with the light gray at the top and have it gradate (word? probably not...) down to dark gray at the bottom. It is my dearest futile hope that this design choice will maximize my (tiny) bust and minimize my (enormous) waist.

Unfortunately, to spin a 3-ply DK weight yarn, I have to spin singles that look like this:



Not so bad you say? Check it out as photographed by my massive telephoto lens:



Those guide hooks are 1/2 and inch in diameter. I appropriately titled this photo "Infuriating" on Flickr. I have been spinning this one bobbin for a week now. HATE IT. Hopefully the end product will be worth all this tedium.

Luckily for me (ha ha) I got kicked in the back by my friend's horse on Monday night, so I had all day yesterday to wander around in a Vicodin-induced haze and wash armloads of fleece. I am okay (just some very minor internal bleeding and a very nasty bruise complete with horseshoe nail marks, I shit you not) but we were at the ER until 2am while I got My First CT Scan and chest x-rays.

So I washed a 4+ pound corriedal ram fleece for E. and half of Mimi's fleece. I fully expected for the Corriedale to be really dirty, but Mimi's fleece, despite looking clean and lustrous, had to be washed twice and rinsed four times. It was truy disgusting. To add insult to injury (in so many ways) Mimi's fleece was not nearly as pretty once I had washed it. We'll just have to see how it cards up.