All in a Day

I had a REALLY, REALLY bad day at work but look what I found in my mailbox. Jackpot! I am climbing on the couch and taking the phone off the hook. If they don't get my mojo back nothing will.

Doomed From the Start

That Harvest Wrap that took me several exasperating tries to get warped came to a sad conclusion. The tension was never right, so silly me tried to unwind it all and re-roll it with something a bit thicker. Bad, bad idea. I ended up cutting it off and then noticed that I was not very fond of the way the variegated yarn was working with the plaid thing I had going anyway.













I keep reminding myself that you learn as much from your mistakes as you do your successes but it still felt pretty darn bad to have to cut all that pretty yarn off the loom.

Harvest Time

I can't grow doodly-squat in my heavily wooded yard so several years ago I borrowed a corner of my parent's yard to plant a fig tree. Saturday morning my dad called to say that the figs were finally beginning to ripen. The few that remain after the bugs and critters have their fill are the most glorious things on the planet.













The shelf life for ripe figs is about a minute or two so I used the leftovers to make fig preserves. They cooked all night in the crock pot and are now so sweet and gooey that my morning toast won't know what hit it. 6 AM might not feel so bad for a while.

Bye Bye Baby

Daughter and boyfriend headed off this morning to their new life in NYC.











After all the tearful goodbyes, I was in need of cheering up so I took myself to my favorite place on the planet, Ikea. I'm not exactly smiling yet but a cinnamon bun is a pretty good diversion.











I won't go on and on about how rotten it is to say goodbye to your kids as they grow up and leave because the Yarn Harlot already said it all here this week.

2 Plus 2 Equals Infinity

I find it hard to believe I only used 4 colors of dye on my Gulf Coast batts. Now that I am down to the heel on one of the socks, I can see that my idea of creating a repeating color sequences is right out the window. Turquoise, fushia, lime green and chestnut hand painted in careful stripes apparently equals every color under the sun and then some. No matter. I can always use another pair of crazy clown socks that probably will match one of my bazillion pairs of Crocs.

Meet Frankenskein

Here is the first bit of yarn made from the Phat Fiber June Fluff box.
I think it's very pretty.













It's even prettier as a little ball.
















I still have a lot of that fiber left to spindle before I can even think of knitting but I am just dying to swatch.

Much More Than I Counted On

Here is that little "shrug" I am knitting out of a giant mound of roving I bought eons ago and spun as my TDF challenge. It is my first attempt at spinning something human sized. I took the time to measure each skein and figured I had about 600 yards. That didn't seem like much after looking at some simple sweater patterns but here it is after using up 3 of my 5 balls of yarn. I still have a large ball for each sleeve so I guess my shrug is now a sweater?