future nostalgia

I feel like I am going to look back at this time in my life and feel a sense of nostalgia for it.  Life is good here.  The routine is good.  I don't really like Zac being on rotating shifts for the foreseeable future, but the money is good and it's mostly 8 hour shifts anyway, so he's getting a lot of down time even if it's not days off.

Yeah, you heard that right, the day shift supervisor position is likely off the table for now.  They are just simply too understaffed.  Welp.  It makes for good job security, that's for sure.

As for stuff going on in my life, I've been overseeing the backyard landscaping, and womp womp, poop on me, I don't have a picture.  But it's not done yet anyway.  It's somewhere in between.  Today the pergola went up! The rest of the yard is plants and mostly mulch, but we're having a pad of concrete poured for a shed.  That's happening early next week.  Then.  Then I promise to get a few photos!

And for the thing you all were wondering about, crafting.  What have I been up to in the last week and some days?

sweater knitting, and lots of it.

I finished the baby sweater! It's so cute! I made it out of knit picks stroll, and the pattern is Fossil Frenzy tee Jr with long sleeves instead of short ones.  And you read that right! this is the Junior pattern, so there's a Senior pattern out there if you want a full-sized sweater with fossils on!

I also finished my New Year's Eve Cast On for this year:

This one is the Reyna shawl.  It's a free pattern that is highly adjustable.  You can basically make it any size you want and you can also customize the widths of the garter and mesh bands.  I followed the pattern until the end and then just added garter rows till I was almost out of yarn. I bound off with about 4 grams to spare.  Easy peasy! The yarn is a mystery cause I'm trash and threw away the tag, but I do remember it was 100% superwash merino, which means it was always destined to be a shawl or a hat.  Socks require nylon when they're done out of a fiber like merino.

And that left me the crochet cardigan (it got one row from me in the last few days) and my Nightshades  birthday sweater of yore.  (or last year if you're keeping track).  and lookie what we have here! I took a picture:

Here is sleeve number 2.  I use the markers to keep track of increasing.  You can't quite tell from this picture, but the yarn is essentially black, so markers and a good light source were necessary.  I got through the rest of the sleeve in just an evening and started the process of attaching the sleeves to the body at the under arm.  Ended up looking a bit like this:

Here it is after a few repeats of the raglan chart.

And here you can see a close up of the cabling.  It's a lovely pattern, just enough interest going on.  Ironically, I haven't been reading during the day while knitting, though this actually would be a good pattern for that.  It's mostly knitting around and around with cables and decreasing every other round.

Now I am a few more repeats past this, almost to the end of the sweater!

I don't have any immediate plans to cast on anything, so my WIP count when I'm done with this will be one. a  single WIP.  1. wild!

I do have eventual plans to cast on something in the next few weeks though.  I saw a delightful sock pattern today called "herding cats" and it's socks with cats on.  I'm going to make a pair for Hazel.  I know, she just got a pair last time, but these have her name written all over them.  I also might cast on a vanilla sock for knitting without paying attention.

I didn't talk about fiber the last time I visited.  I got a few bumps of fiber from my brother for Christmas and I immediately prepped and started one of them that day.

Here is three waters farm.  It's a polwarth silk blend and I don't know if you can tell, but I'm doing a fractal ply.

The entire braid was 3 entire repeats of the colors, so I divided the braid in 3 matching lengths of top.  The first section I left alone and am spinning straight through so the color lengths will be long and won't repeat.  The second section I divided in two and will spin them one after the other in the same order, so the entire spectrum will repeat twice, the colors will be about half as long.  The third I halved again and ended up with 4 sections.  I'll spin those one after another in the same order so it'll repeat the color order 4 times and be 4 times shorter each.

After I finish spinning these singles I'll ply them together as a traditional three-ply and it'll create a neat effect.  Done perfectly the ends of the yarn will all be the same tone and the middle will be barborpoled where the colors change at different rates.

Anyway, I didn't actually get very far with this spinning job.  I only spun for a few days before I put Edith back in the closet under the stairs.

Looking at those colors though is extremely inspirational. 

One of my plans this year for crafting is to spin a sweater.  And the first step is to source the fiber.  I don't want to have to prep the fiber, so a fleece is right out.  I prefer worsted prep because I spin worsted, so I went looking on etsy.

etsy is interesting, cause at first glance there's not always a lot of variety in types of wool there.  A vast majority of it is merino.  It's gotten a lot better though, noticeably, I've seen BFL, polwarth, silk blends, and there's also been an uptick of slightly rarer breeds like Finn and Jacob.  I didn't really want to do merino.  It's slippery and requires a lot more twist.  I have my e-spinner, but I wanted to use my treadle wheel.  Anyway.

I found a few options, but it's also tricky in other ways cause most sellers don't dye an enormous amount of the same dye lots of things, and many of them don't do custom orders.  Also I didn't really want to deal with color management.  I prefer a solid or semi-solid color. In the end I reached out to a dyer that I've used in the past who came through when the yarn I ordered from them wasn't quite right.  She's cashmere and coconuts and her colors are delicious.  She was happy to take the custom job and so I ordered 16 ounces of a polwarth in a seafoam green color.  It'll be a lot to spin, but it'll be nice to have a nice long-term project like this.  I did do something similar a few years ago, got about 9 ounces of  undyed cheap wool from webs and dyed it yellow, but I ended up hating the color and overdyeing it *again* and I still haven't knit with it.  oops.

I try not to say stuff like "I wish I did X more" cause if I really did wish I did that more, I would do it.  I'm not one to hold myself back from pouring myself into things I want to be doing.  BUT, I do wish I'd pull my wheel out more.  Whenever I do, I feel like I should have been doing it the whole time.

I wonder if I should set aside some time, like after I drop Toby off at school and before that second cup of coffee, or maybe after that second cup of coffee and before I lose myself in youtube, just a little bit every day.  I'll see progress on it if I do it that way.

Anyway, that's about it for me.  I've been basically monogamous the whole time, working one project from the middle to completion after another.  It's going to be weird when there's all new projects happening.

Reading is still happening, too.  I am 3/4 books into a fantasy romance by KF Breene.  it's fun, sexy, a bit of magic, some more sexy on top of that.  good times.

Cheers!