4 days down, 176 to go

School. Waking up early. Homework. BLEH. But with the school year starting, good things come too. Knitting Guild meetings started on Wednesday and Mom and I became official members. We have a lot of people this year. So many that next month, we're going to get a bigger room to have the meetings in. Yesterday, we went to the Spinner's Flock guild meeting in Chelsea. It's a long drive but worth it. It was a lot of fun and the people seem nice. Elizabeth belongs to it so, she was there and I got to hang out with her, which is always cool.

Oh, the other day, I finished spinning up the first roving that I dyed.



It's a 3ply worsted weight (colors are a little washed out in pic). It was also my first try at navajo plying. I've been thinking about trying out navajo plying since reading about it on other blogs. I looked up a few tutorials and found only ones on how to do it on a wheel. Since I'm using drop spindles, I just winged it and kinda translated the instructions from wheel to spindle. It's pretty easy and I ended up with enough to make a scarf. The way I split it up, I'm pretty sure that I can end up with a scarf that has two matching ends. I'm thinking, since I have enough scarves, I'll knit it at school and which ever friend of mine likes the colors, I'll give it to them.

weekend full of fibery goodness

Summer is coming to an end. Tomorrow, school will start again, which means less time to do allr the things I like to do, post, spin, and knit. So, this weekend we got in some last days of school free fiber fun.



On Saturday, we went to MSU for the Llama Fest. We looked at a whole lot a llamas and Mom tried to convince Dad that we could get away with keeping a llama in our backyard. I might have a few llama pictures in my Flickr if I get around to loading them. Then, we hit the vendors. I was very good. The only thing I bought was an 8oz ball of cream 100% alpaca roving. (bad pic but I'm too lazy to take another at the moment)



Then, on Sunday, I convinced Mom that we needed to go up to our NSLYS*, Threadbear because I needed some sort of sock yarn that would look good in plain stockinette socks. I had no self striping in my stash, so I went up there looking for some. We got slightly distracted with how much the store has changed since we were last there, which was sometime during the last school year. They now carry a lot more spinning stuff than last time. We found silk hankies!!! After we made our way through the entire store, we finally found the sock yarn and I spent forever trying to decide. They didn't have much in the ways of self striping but, they had a really good selection of hand-dyed and variegated (can you believe it took my 4 times to spell that right just now?) sock yarns. I finally picked Colinettte Jitterbug in the colorway Mardi Gras. Hopefully it will pool or something in an interesting way because this will be my school sock for the first day.

Knitting a plain sock in school on the first day is my way of making sure my teachers figure out that I can knit and pay attention in class at the same time. It also helps me find out which teachers don't want me to knit while they talk or in class at all. Some teachers are weird about it. Last year, my English teacher would let me knit while she talked but not while we worked in groups. On time, my group finished up our work fast and then they started talking about shoes. So I started knitting and the teacher came up behind me and said that she would rather I participate in the group more. So, to avoid getting in trouble, I now make sure to have easy knitting in class with me and I take it out right after the teacher starts talking. I keep my eyes up and my hands moving. It seems to work well.

Since school is going to start, you can probably expect posts to be only on the weekends. Happy Labor Day to those in the US.



*Not-So-Local-Yarn-Shop
**If this post seemed to pop out of nowhere, it's because it's been a draft for a while and I just put the pictures in and published it