Happy Yarn Friends

This week has been pretty mild weather for a January and most of the handknits were shed around noon and put back on when the sun went down. Today, Wednesday the 21st, I'm wearing Durhamknits' Multnomah in a hipster scarf kind of way and it's been keeping the chill off my neck all day. I love the squashiness, the drape, everything about this shawl. I especially love that she was knitting it for me and sent it to me in a giant pile of woolly love from several of my far friends. It's just amazing to find such a pocket of kindness. Hooray for yarn friends!

The warm weather has also been great for getting some work done in the garage. My loom has lived there since we moved in and I've been itching to get her put back together and to have that space as a usable studio, of sorts. The lawnmower still has to live there, but the yard tools and I pretty much live in harmony. The big part is sorting through all the stuff that never quite got moved into the house, getting rid of what can be got rid of and putting away the rest of the things into their right places. I put up shelves and did some organization and it's so very close to being cleared out enough for my loom.

I made the shelves just high enough for me to reach and put things up and take them down again by myself. I need to replace the boards, but those are good enough for now. There's a ways yet to go and it won't be done until spring, but I did manage to find all of my fabric.

Some spinning got done, too, and I finished my very first gradient yarn as part of Project Make. I'd considered making the two skeins fraternal, but dear Bekah convinced me to spin them up the same. That's what friends are for, right?

I love this picture so much. It's the happiest thing and the colors are perfect for a winter-weary Jess. This is about 200yds of Z-spun, S-plied WTF?IDK batt with so much sparkle, that there is a German Sparkle Party somewhere that wants its yarn back. It's about 11wpi, or about a DK weight, though the yellowest parts may slide into fingering weight. It's Navajo plied, which isn't a new technique to me, but one that I haven't used very much. I like it for this kind of color gradation, but the WTF?IDK batt wasn't as evenly spun as other fiber preps, so sometimes the yarn got weird on me where the switchback was on the chain. I'm pretty sure nobody calls it a switchback, but I couldn't think what else to call the part of the chain that goes through the loop and back again. It's like a switchback road, Y? N?

Well, not much knitting has been done this week, though I did get past the heel in the Fork in the Garbage Disposal socks. I like the heel! Ding-ding-ding-a-dinga-ding-ding! But I may try to find a way to avoid the provisional cast-on in the middle. It did get a little fiddly. What I have been working on is the Ripple Afghan. I'm totally in love with it and I can't think of anything else right now. Though I'm cuddled up in its much older brother right now, Mr. Rippley has been my morning coffee friend, as has a far friend up Nort' who is a retired teacher and a delightful woman. We're stay-at-home bros.
So that's really about all that's been going on, though it's all been very intense. I did get my new glasses and I'm starting on a small sewing project, which I'll probably talk about next week. Until then, I'm going to peruse ideas for small projects to make with fabric scraps because some destashing has to happen there, too.

This week's technique:

• A provisional cast-on a la Lucy Neatby. I needed this one for the Fork in the Road socks and just picked a provisional cast on out of the proverbial hat. This one served just fine, but was a little fiddly. It could be user error because it wasn't a technique I'm terribly used to and I wasn't accustomed to stopping in the middle of a sock to cast on and re-join. 

I've been working on:

• Fork in the Road socks in Andey Originals sock yarn
• Neat Ripple Pattern in Knit Picks Brava
• Solar Flare batt in WTF IDK fiber
• My garage