Busy weekends and IT fails

Here we all are on Tuesday. I like to blog over the weekend and upload at some point on a Monday. This week the IT gremlins have been against me. I think this is attempt three at writing this week's blog! Every time I try to save it and preview it, it seems to vanish into the ether. Give me strength!

So here I go again. Fingers crossed!

This weekend saw our annual pilgrimage to Rotherham for our Goddaughter's birthday party. I have no idea where the last five years have gone! It's scary. Her party this year was in the local community centre. I was chief butty-maker and I think I did quite well - there were very few left! So much for a sneaky snack for the journey home! I also did the birthday girl's hair... And then her sister's!  Between the journey of 2 hours each way, and the desire to escape the noise of 30 five year olds having fun, I got a lot of knitting done. Happy days!

On to the crafting.

FO's

Again, I failed! I'm trying to get Mum's birthday present done in time, so I'm pretty much monogamous at the moment. The FO count remains nil!

WIP's

This week sees  the Evenstar  get most of the love. I'm determined to get this done for Mum's birthday. Two rows now take 2 hours to knit so I'm looking at 24 hours to finish chart 3 and then there's the simple task of the 56 chart repeats of the beaded border! Hysteria is setting in when I work out how many  hours in the day I have available to knit!

Church windows grow

My Inspira cowl did make it out of the bag and got a few rows added to its length, but as I said before, my main focus has to remain on the Evenstar!

Spinning

 Last week I told you about my long night finishing the singles for my Knitabulls SAL. I also started plying the 2 together. To has to have been the worst plan in the world EVER!  I was so tired I plied  about 200 yards in the same direction as I'd spin the singles! The over spun crispy nightmare shows that when you're tired, it's an utterly stupid idea to keep on going!  Thus the second skein was a mere 540 yards. I'm so angry with myself. The second skein was the better skein I think. I spun the singles differently. The first single I broke into about foot lengths and spun from them and the second I spun directly from the braid. It gave gorgeously long colour repeats and when I plied them together the yarn had bold barber poling! I love it, it's just a shame that such a huge chunk of it wound up as a firelighter!

 

The skein on the left is my favourite

 



Yarn barf/fire lighter! Same thing

 

 

As a reward for finishing my SAL I decided to start on some gorgeous fibre from Nunoco. I spun up the sample batt the girls sent me - Kasbah. It can best be described as a thing of beauty! It's the first time I've spun from a batt, so the result is a little thick and thin which can be no way put down to the fibre! I decided to navaho ply it to preserve the colours. In doing this I managed to put too much spin into the finished yarn!

 

 From this.....

 

 

To this!

 

I thought the horrendous over spin could be corrected to some degree with a good hard wash and thwack.  It spurred me on to wash and thwack umpteen skeins I've spun recently and just put away. Five skeins later and I'm done!

Goals for next week:

Finish chart 3 of the Evenstar (chortle!)
Spin up some of the gorgeous shiney-ness that is Dark Wings.

Have a great week, I'll catch you all on the flip side!