Round and Round

Happy Easter early! I finished the Easter Egg KAL Arne and Carlos were having and have twelve beautiful round Norwegian-style eggs sitting in a basket:

These eggs were really fun to knit! Each egg took about 3 - 4 hours to knit and stuff with polyester fiberfill, so I could finish one in a day or two. I only knit on them when I wanted to. I knit all twelve eggs between March 17 and 26, so I think you could knit three or four of them by Easter. You can watch all the KAL episodes (about Norway in Easter, not about knitting; the eggs are really easy to knit), and buy the pattern here. I was getting pretty discouraged with my knitting, and making these cute little Easter eggs were just the ticket to get me out of the doldrums!

The messy wrangle with the Fiadh Beast is over:

I cannot tell you how happy I was to finally get round to finishing it! It will be a warm sweater that I will wear almost every day this winter, and I'm very happy with it. It has Gone Upstairs to be blocked, so it may be winter before I see it again, but it's too warm now to wear it, so that's ok. I was just so happy to be done with it. It's a well-designed pattern, and I might have liked knitting it in another yarn, but the Bartlettyarn made it heavy and hard to wrangle into submission. I felt like I fought with it every step of the way ... but, that being said, I'm really happy to wear it knitted in Bartlettyarn because a) it has a lot of lanolin in it; b) it will be very hard wearing yarn; c) it will bloom and be soft after blocking; and d) all the real Aran sweaters were knit in minimally processed, full of lanolin, sheepy-smelling yarn. So I love it.

I've made some progress in my spinning, too.

There was a bit of fiber that was intriguing in my "spinning" box, so I spun it up. It was 1.48 ounces of brown/blue/olive green/teal commercially dyed (not hand dyed) roving that felt as though it had some mohair in it, though I really have no clue what fiber it is or where I got it. Maybe it has alpaca in it, dunno. 

The finished skein is a lovely dark brown that has a deep, resonant color of dark brown with the teal, blue, olive showing through. It's quite pretty. I did it 2-ply and it came out about fingering to sport weight. I'd call it a light sport weight yarn.

But when I put it in the sunshine ... whoa! It just lit up! So pretty!

Right now I am spinning a big (308g/10.86 oz.) ball of fiber commercially dyed with blue, green, purple and black.

It feels like wool, Coopworth or Romney. It isn't particularly soft, but it isn't harsh. Just really woolly. It will be warm! There is no lanolin in it either. Once again, I have no idea where I bought it, but I think it might have been at Sharon's moving sale, which was 1243438768709978876 years ago. Note to self: When getting fiber, attach a label saying where and when you got the fiber, as well as what the #%&*#@#%^ fiber is. Fiber usually doesn't have anything like a ball band, like yarn. Imagine if you bought yarn with no ball bands! Horror!

I was going to spin it in a 3-ply, but when I got started, I decided to spin it 2-ply and make a light sport/heavy fingering weight. I'm think it would make a lovely, lacy shawl for spring and a nice lacy scarf in the winter. Also I think it will become softer after setting the twist and after blocking the finished shawl.

This picture doesn't really do justice to show how beautiful it spins up. I think it might be the prettiest yarn I have ever spun! 

My spinning wheel has been going round and round very happily with this fiber. I hope you have a wonderful, happy Easter! Happy knitting and spinning! (click to find the Easter Egg)