Procrastination in all its forms

Apologies for the blog silence. Uni has been busy, my internship has started, and to top it all off, I spent a lot of last week being sick with a rather rotten head-cold. Being sick is never a lot of fun, but at least I got some of my assignments done. For some reason though, I never feel like knitting when I'm ill. I've done a little bit of work on my cardigan, but I've been terribly lazy when it comes to finishing my hand warmers. This is especially deplorable because I know very well that all they really need is an hour or so of work, and then they'll be done. Bad Anna.

On the up side, I have been doing some more spinning!




I bought this a while back, but wanted to go through all of my dodgier 'learning' fibre before I tackled it. And I actually kept this resolution - the last of the plain fibre was dyed with avocado pits and spun up during the week, so I've started on the nicer stuff!




(I know the photo is slightly weird - I am having Camera Issues at the moment). I'm really enjoying learning how to spin. I find it very relaxing, and kind of addictive. And I can do it when my eyes are too tired to knit, which is a plus. And as you can see, I'm gradually improving - the above skein is bordering on respectable! That said, I tried my hand at plying last night and the result is, erm, not quite as impressive. But still, that's what learning is all about, I suppose.

Next post, actual knitting content - I promise! In the mean time, I leave you with a picture of the home brewed beer we bottled a few weeks ago. Still needs a little bit of time to improve, but it's pretty good - the first brew I've been involved in from start to finish. Exciting! (well, I think so)

Learning by Doing is a Grand Thing

Okay, fine, no completed set of hand-warmers just yet, but one thing that I neglected to mention last post is that I have been renewing my assault on the pile of fibre that lives in my craft pile. I did make a few attempts at learning how to spin last year (or was it the year before... jeez, I don't even know), but I then, cleverly, managed to lose my drop spindle. And it was the most frustrating variety of losing something though; the kind where you know that it has to be in your house somewhere, so you refrain from buying a new one because you are quite convinced that the moment that you do, the old one will reappear. So my pretty fibre languished. But then the drop spindle did, in fact, reappear (it had fallen down behind some books on one of my shelves... because this makes perfect sense, right), and recently I finally found the time to use it.



These are the first three results of the renewed attempt to learn how to hand-spin. Three guesses which is the first try. What's that, you say? They're all sad looking skeins of noob yarn? Okay, fine, the blue was the first attempt, the green the second, and the variegated was the third.

Perhaps you can't really see in the photo, but the improvement from the first to the most recent is amazing. This is one of the things that I love the most about knitting, and crafty things in general - you can actually see yourself improve in quite a short time if you only take the time to practice. The above were spun over a period of about a week, and every day that I picked up the spindle, I was better at it. Don't get me wrong, I'm still very much a clumsy, beginner. But seeing yourself make progress is fantastic. I really do think that it's the little things in life that make you happy, and this is definitely one of the little things in my arsenal.

Next time, hand-warmers! Now it's back to what I was doing: drinking tea, eating freshly baked lavender, honey and lemon shortbread, watching the Arcade Fire concert being streamed on You Tube, and knitting with my divinely imperfect hand-spun. It is good to be Anna this afternoon.

Bendigo!

Well, as previously mentioned, last weekend was the Bendigo Sheep Show. Hurrah!

I got up ridiculously early on Saturday morning in order to make my train. Okay, perhaps 5:30am is not ridiculously early, but it was definitely earlier than I would have liked. Getting to the train station was a bit of debacle, because I got to the path I usually take, and subsequently found that there was no more path - only a construction site where the path had previously been. Whoops. There was a lot of blundering around in the dark and a little bit of fence hopping, but I got there eventually, and with my biscuits still intact, no less. That, my friends, is what we call hardcore!

Thankfully, once we (we being myself and Rowena, the day's partner in knitting crime) got on the train, everything ran smoothly. The trip up was uneventful - there was a lot of fog, so the view from the train was pretty uninteresting, although I did see kangaroos at one stage (which might have been interesting if I hadn't grown up in this country and spent enough time outside the city that a kangaroo has long since ceased being novel, but I'll stop being snarky now, shall I?). Knitting was done, and biscuits were ingested!




The actual show was good fun. There was lots to see and touch, and lots of shiny nice yarny things to buy. We got to see a lot of Ravelry people, which was awesome, if a little surreal at times (it's a little unnerving when a random stranger identifies the pattern you used to make your cardigan when there is a grand total of three square inches of said cardigan peeking out from under your coat). I, for what it's worth, got to see a couple of completed Sylvi coats!

Now, for your viewing pleasure, and proof that it all happened, here is me being an idiot with a cardboard alpaca cutout. Because, let's face it, I am an idiot some of the time.




And look! It hardly rained at all!




Anyway, an awesome time was had. I got to play with sheep and alpaca, find out more about natural dyeing (which ties in nicely with a lot of my recent and upcoming experiments), chat with a bunch of lovely people about handspinning and dyeing, and lots of other stuff. Oh, and we also watched the wool fashion parade, which was very amusing, though more for the pained expressions on the male models' faces than anything else (roped in, anyone?).

And then we got on the bus and made our way back to the station. Good day was had!
Look - bus cam! Two degenerate fibre fixated young ladies, full of biscuits, and quite thoroughly worn out!




And of course, I bought stuff. Because it was shiny and nice and that's one of the reasons that you go! I acquired both roving and yarn, which has come back to bite me because my spindle has magically disappeared, and I Can't Find It Anywhere. Seriously, I have spent hours looking for it. Meh. I'm sure it will appear the very moment I purchase a new one. At any rate, here is the haul from the show, frustrated, spindle-lacking fibre and all the rest:




On the left, there's some beautiful spinnables from Stranded in Oz and Ms Gusset (yay Kylie!). I also got bitten by the hand-dyed yarn bug again (sigh, I can't resist it, even though I never know quite what to do with it either), as you can see in the centre - some merino 2ply, also from Stranded in Oz. The purple and brown skeins on the top right are a wool/alpaca blend from one of the stallholders whose name I didn't catch. It's lovely yarn, and looks much nicer in the sun when the subtleties in the colour really come out. And the tiny wee packet on the end (which refused to photograph) is 10g of dyed silk from the Handweavers & Spinners Guild (for me to get my filthy mitts on once I find that bloody spindle...). Definitely enough to keep me busy for a while!

I've been up other things on the crafty front since I got back, but this is such a long post already that I think it might have to wait for another time. Or not at all perhaps - there is another dyeing experiment in the works and I am unsure about how well it will turn out, so if you don't hear about it again, it means that the exercise was a dismal failure and I am trying to block it from my mind! And on that glorious note, I'm off to go for my run.

Survival!

Well, exams are over for another year. Thank heavens for that. So now I have nine sweet, sweet days to procrastinate before I skip the country. I'm seeing a lot of knitting in my future. Not to mention I need to pick a project or two to take with me on holiday - I guess it will have to be something fairly lightweight, and probably in a small gauge, as I need something that'll occupy me for as long as possible without being too bulky... *muses idly* Socks or lace, I guess.


There hasn't really been a great deal going on around here as far as knitting goes - exams sort of ate my brain, and when I was knitting, a lot of it was just random swatches of stuff - it was just pure knitting for stress relief. However, I have started a summery top - I was sort of in between projects and needed something to take to the Melbourne Ravelry meet up (which incidentally was about eighteen different kinds of fun, and I met buckets of awesome and talented people), so I figured I'd finally try out the design I'd concocted a while back.

(please ignore the immensely unflattering around-the-house pants - that's an order)

I started from the waist and am working upwards in an openwork rib stitch pattern. I wanted something airy and light, but also something that wouldn't be totally shapeless (I'm not a fan of the whole empire waist thing that everyone seems to be so enamoured with at the moment - the fact that I don't think that they do anyone any favours aside, I have a waist, and I'd like to make the most of it instead of hiding it, thank you very much), so a lace ribbing seemed like a good compromise. I'm also adding some shaping by decreasing in the purl sections. I quite like how it's coming along - it's quite loose, so should be good in the warmer weather. It's in a pretty cheap cotton acrylic blend, but if I end up liking how it comes out, I might end up trying another version in a nicer yarn.

Speaking of nice yarn: I got my post-exam reward in the mail this morning. It soothed my one-beer-too-many-the-night-before headache quite nicely too.

Yum. They're from Live 2 Knit and they are quite, quite lovely. And one of them is yellow! I never thought that I'd ever buy yellow yarn - normally, yellow is most definitely not a colour that I go in for. But I couldn't resist this, and it's so beautiful that I'm glad that I didn't - it's like summer time in skein form. They're going to be socks. I'm thinking I'll try my hand at toe-ups for a change. I just invested in a new sock knitting book, and I'm itching to try some of the techniques in it. I'm also idly considering some colourwork, because these two yarns do look beautiful together.

Oh, and again, speaking of yarn (but not quite as impressively gorgeous, to say the least):

My other post exam present to myself (hey, I need all of the bribery that I can muster) was a drop spindle. See this yarn? I made it! And I made it that colour as well! Yeah, yeah, I know it leaves a little to be desired - this was my second attempt at spinning (second to a five minute spree when I first got the spindle), and because I have a short attention span when it comes to following instructions, my technique still leaves a lot to be desired. Still, I'm very pleased with it. I do love doing things myself, even when the result is a little bit half arsed. The way that I see it is that when you make something yourself, you can either sit there and be dissatisfied with it because it isn't perfect, or you can make the choice to love it anyway because you made it and you enjoyed making it. I opt for the latter. I'm going to use it to make a pouch for my poor long-suffering laptop mouse...

Anyway, I'm off to have a quiet moment with a strawberry Freddo Frog, and then I'm off to bed.