Tour de February

It's only been a few days, but I have some good things to chat about!

I have a round up of finishes to talk about and a fancy new start.  Good things.

First things first:

 

I finished my socks! These are nice.  I luff them.

Secondly, I finished my final fantasy 9 epic cross stitch!

This finish feels really good.  I love the way it turned out.  I am.. mmm.. a little unhappy with the subtle back-stitching I added, but it's not really my forte and it's fine.  I'm, well, I'm kind of proud of my work here.  It was a lot of it-- from the drawing of the pixel art and the converting it to a design to the stitching itself. The stitching was almost the least of it, cause I can cross stitch just about anything.  The title did get a bit long, but overall, it was an enjoyable cross stitch!

I took a few hours in between finishing this and diverting my energies.  I had a big job to tackle, and it directly involved floss.  See, when I bought the 180ish colors that I needed for this, I didn't put them all in boxes-- Frankly, I didn't have the space in my current configuration of boxes.  I sorted them by hundreds in little baggies, like this:

 After resorting the Quina colors back into those bags, I pulled out the floss boxes I bought.  I bought some boxes last week, for floss.

It actually took a lot less time than I first expected, and the three boxes I got were the perfect number of boxes for this:

Look at that! sorted by number. :chef's kiss:

That being done, I focused my efforts back on my polwarth/silk spin from Christmas.  I'm having my own little tour de fleece in February:

So, in order, there are three bobbin's worth of singles, and the beginning of plying from yesterday.  Then I washed and dried the finished skein overnight and voila! This morning I have a brand new skein of 3-ply yarn.  It's lovely stuff, softer than sin.  I also enjoy the way the colors are playing together, it's exactly the sort of barber pole that I was expecting when I planned it out.  There are lengths where it's all gray, and lengths where it's all blue, and intermingling where the singles separated into different colors.

It's 570 yards in about a hundred grams.  It's... thin.  I don't mind it for a one-off skein, but I'm noticing that more and more.  I aim for a fingering (that is anywhere from 350-450 yards per hundred gram) and I end up with light fingering.  Sometimes sport (thicker than fingering), which is, admittedly, odd.   I also feel like there might be a little bit of funny math here involving a slight tend to pull back while I pull forward while I draft.  That slight woolen spinning might have a tendency to add a bit more air into my finished yarn which gives the yarn the appearance of being thinner than it actually seems, based on the yardage.  But that being said, this yarn does look pretty thin, and I'm not trying to fool myself, either.

I decided for my next project that I would avoid the issue of fixing my default singles spinning and aim for a four-ply.  I'm just going to do a traditional one where I spin on 4 different bobbins and then ply the lot together.  It's all the same dye lot of the same fiber, there's no color play. This is a sweater spin, so 16 ounces of polwarth that I custom ordered:

 

I started last night:

Oh! this stuff is amazing.  Polwarth has some unique qualities that I really like.  It's soft as a merino, but not slippery like merino.  So, it has some body, but can easily draft without the fibers getting stuck together.  It can easily get enough twist to hold together despite being thinly drafted.  Sometimes merino will draft and seem good and get on the bobbin and suddenly there's not enough twist and it drifts apart-- it'll drift apart up closer to the bobbin so you didn't know it wasn't a solid yarn until it's too late and you have to pull out the single till it's secure (these problems tend to escalate, cause then you've found that your single has lost twist having lost the tension of being pulled by the wheel against your hand. and you realize that it's probably been awhile that you've probably been drafting too fast and not letting the twist gather before pushing it on the bobbin.  I'm going on and on.  Merino is difficult to spin.  I've decided to exclusively spin it on my EEW6 so that it can definitely get enough twist without having to worry about it.  Polwarth on the other hand, polwarth is a good fiber for my treadle wheel.

To conclude my ode to polwarth, It's a great combination of things.  It'll definitely be next to skin soft, and right now I'm leaning more toward that sort of thing as opposed to more rustic woolen spun type yarns.

One of the reasons I'm doing my own personal Tour De Fleece right now is because it's exciting and I love to spin any old time. XD  Another is early July is not going to be a great time to spin-- we're taking a family trip this year! First one since the world shut down.  We're going to Hawaii with Zac's family!   Working with wool in tropical environments does not sound like a lot of fun.  I may try to finish the spinning before we go and knit the sweater while on the plane and stuff, but I'm certainly not spinning while there (I would bring spindles if I were going to spin, I'm not going to bring a wheel, electric or otherwise).

And that is that as far as crafting goes.  In house update news, Zac's weekend is starting tomorrow!  We're planning on painting Hazel's room and possibly putting in the cat door on her bathroom door.  Very Exciting.  I will report. 

In life news, I do have news! I am getting lasik this year!  End of May!  That is a few months away, but I'm still stoked about it.  I'll be getting monovision, since I am mostly farsighted.  This'll be an interesting transition, but one I'm looking forward to for sure!

With that, I'll let you go.  I don't think I'll be back as soon as I have been more recently.  I have had so many finishes in the last week or so, that getting my WIPs up to 'sharable content' level might take awhile. Plus, I'm really just feeling this polwarth. nnf. It's all blue too, so that'll get boring for you all real quick.  There's only so many ways to say "it's nice and I like it."

That being said, it's very nice and I like it.

Cheers!