Well, since it’s halfway through August, it only makes sense that I finally give you an update on how spring went, right?
Q2 kicked my butt – I’m not even gonna try to be nice about it. It was rough. I was so ready for it to be over, it’s not even funny. There were a couple serious medical things that happened, some blind-sided financial crap that came up and to top it all off, we had to put my sweet Ellie dog to sleep (I’m sure there will be eventually a post about that when I can manage to type about it without sobbing, but today is not that day). In the meantime, here is the last pic I have of my knitting where she photobombed.
Come the end of June, I was throwing my hands up, calling ‘uncle’ to the universe and begging for a respite of some sort. As always, burying myself in some yarn and fiber never makes things worse. So I did that. It’s better than many other ‘habits’ one could pick up and it keeps you warm.
Some spring patio knitting at our new table resulted in some fun new socks.
A Doctor Who-themed cowl that is cozy and lovely when it cools down some here.
And because socks are soothing and mindless knitting for me, another pair flew off of the needles.
I finished up a spin that had been on my wheel for WAY too long to be just one braid, but it’s pretty and shiny and very soft, so I’ll forgive it.
I decided to tackle this GIANT roll of fiber from Briar Rose that I picked up 2 years ago at Wooster.
A friend had a baby surprise, and he had a Harry Potter-themed nursery, which meant he also needed a Harry Potter-themed handknit jumper (…if only I could bewitch my needles to knit on their own, like Mrs. Weasley…).
I took a lovely braid of Fiber Optic to the 80th Anniversary Guild spin in and came home with a lovely bobbin of singles, that were chain-plyed the next day on my mini-spinner.
I finished another sweater for myself! And it required steeking! And there were no tears!
P.S. – Steeking is amazing!!
I took another crack at the loom, and promptly warped with the wrong yarn & didn’t notice… until I cut it, naturally. But the finished scarf turned out pretty well. It will be perfect for an ONU Homecoming, if we ever have a chilly one again!
And socks in eye-searing colors. Sometimes, you can force cheery. This yarn is effective.
And more socks, because
This pair used the rest of the warp yarn from the scarf above! I was glad to eek out two projects out of that one skein of pretty yarn!
Tour de Fleece was coming and I had a plan for it – but I wanted to do some practice. Most of my fiber was 100% merino, which I haven’t spun a whole lot of, and definitely not a sweater quantity! I dug to the bottom of my stash and pulled out the first fiber I ever bought. Before a spindle, before a wheel, I bought pounds of this luscious stuff!
- Spin for more large projects
- 1 sweater spun for!
- Sew
nothing to see here… ::shifty eyes:: - Knit more sweaters & socks
- 4 me-sized sweaters & 1 baby-sized sweater
- 7 pairs of socks
- Knit an afghan or 2
- I still have that one on the needles, and I did actually work on it some this quarter!
Learn brioche knittingLearning Weaving Instead. Brioche may happen later.- 2 towels & a scarf!
- Knit from:
- stash – check!
- queue – more or less
- handspun – 2 things, including a sweater
- 20K in finished projects
- Knitting: 10K+
- Spinning: 4K+
- Weaving: 1K+
Donita Westman 