Promised Fibre Content

Here, as promised, is some fibre-related content. :-) There have been some successes and failures this week, so I'll start with the less nice bits. Here is an attempt at a crocheted baby hat:


I say attempted because I'm really not pleased with it at all. I don't understand how it would possibly stay on a baby's head, and I'm clearly struggling to properly join my rounds/turn my work, because there's this funny bit here:

(Difficult to see clearly, but the ends of the rounds don't exactly line up nice and straight, and there seem to be some holes where there shouldn't be.)

Anyway, long story short--I frogged it. And it's now OTN as a knitted baby hat instead. I'm close to halfway through already, so piccies coming soon. (it seems to be working much faster as a knitted hat than a crocheted one, despite the common perception of crochet being quicker, too!)

And I've done some spinning of the dyed items I showed off before. I don't have pics of everything yet, because I've only plied a little sample so far. This is some of the silk hankies plied with some of the merino:

I walk by and pet it every now and then, it's quite soft! So I've spun up a big chunk of the merino now, and am working my way through the rest of the hankies to ply them together. Hope to finish that this week, too, so maybe more piccies by the weekend. Then I think I'll be spinning & plying the rest of the merino with itself.

And my biggest achievement of the week:

Pattern: Swallowtail Shawl by Evelyn A. Clark, Fall 2006 Interweave Knits
Yarn: KnitPicks Shadow in Grape Jelly Heather, *just* over 1 50g ball (I joined in the new ball on the cast-off!)
Needles: KP Options, US4
Modifications: I did 5 extra repeats of the main bud lace section. I had calculated this out so I knew it was enough extra to line up with the new pattern in the lily of the valley section. Unfortunately I didn't calculate all the way through to the peaked edging, where I was 4 stitches short (or some other number long?). And I didn't even realize this until I was well into this section, so the necessary increases to compensate are, um, random! But I think the finished product looks OK anyway, I don't expect many people to examine it so closely that they'll notice.

And a close-up to show off the nupps:


So that's what I have to show now. I hope to post at least once more this week with a few more FOs....because Sunday it's back to work!! Eek! Yes, Sunday--we have a staff retreat from Sunday night to Wednesday night. I'm not terribly excited about this, but I am consoling myself with the knowledge that: I'm planning to take the school "shuttle", so that means 3 hours of knitting time each way, and we'll probably have lots of very long meetings, so that's lots more knitting time. I am also hoping to actually finalize the plans for our middle school during this week. I have been trying to do this for a while, but everyone else seems to think we should wait until the week before school starts to do anything about it. Which I know means I will be very stressed out at the last minute as everything changes, rather than being nice and organized in advance like we could have been! Oh well....stay tuned for more rants in the coming weeks. ;-)