I sold some unused spinning accessories for my Baynes wheel today. (As a side note, spinners are awesome people, and as I have been the recipient of awesome spinning karma in the past, I reached out and passed some along with my offer to sell the jumbo flyer and bobbins I’ll never use for this wheel, and made a spinner very happy.) I had just finalized the price with the buyer, and the e-mail from Paypal confirming that she’d paid me arrived.

Four seconds later, the e-mail from WEBS announcing that they’re now carrying Malabrigo Nube spinning fibre lands in my inbox.

Coincidence? I THINK NOT. Curse you, WEBS. Curse you and your spying, tempty ways.

In other news, I spun stuff and dyed other stuff. Like this 325 yards of superwash merino for a somewhat secret project. Lovely, springy yarn, about a DK weight (a bit lighter than I was aiming for), spun longdraw on the Baynes Colonial upright wheel from faux rolags rolled from 4 oz of commercial SW merino top, and then chain-plied. I’ll probably have to cut my yarn when I get to the few super-thin bits you can see in the skein, remove the thin part, and reattach the thicker stuff to knit again. That can be a problem with chain-plying; it tends to magnify a variance in grist instead of evening it out, the way a true three-ply does.

And Mum’s handspun luxury yarn came out a beautiful deep autumn blaze colour; I am so very, very pleased with it. We’re still not positive it matches the original colour card, but we like the colour it ended up, so we’re counting it a success. (You can’t tell the second batch of silk/cashmere was a buff instead of white at all.) I can’t tell you how hard it is to photograph this colour. It doesn’t help that the fiber content is about half silk, which messes with light reflection. The true colour is somewhere between the two photos.

In the knitting column, I am knitting socks, my first really real socks for me, using the sock yarn Elina sent me in the summer of 2012, and they are looking like real socks so far. I wibbled about switching to stockinette, because I was tired of ribbing but I like the socks Elizabeth knitted for me last December, and they’re ribbed all the way down to just about to the ankle. I had two inches of ribbing, and figured any more would make me snap somewhere along the line, so I switched to stockinette. Except… I should have kept ribbing them, as much as I hate ribbing. Plain stockinette is not as quick as I remember it being (when did I get quicker at doing 2×2 rib?) and I prefer how the variegated yarn looks in the ribbing over the plain stockinette. Bah. Also, these pretty DPNs are teeny and I am bending them as I knit; I’m worried I’ll snap one, and sure, I have an extra, but still. And I need to loosen up my knitting, because I am so tense when I use these teeny needles, and the stitches are too tight. Meow, meow, meow.

Anyway, pretty socks, about a week ago; I have about 2.5 inches of stockinette knitted now:

And I have a shawl problem. I have a lovely shawl pattern, but no yarn for it yet. And I have handspun yarn for shawls, among them this one, but can’t decide on patterns for them. Finally, I have yarn I spun for a shawlette, the pattern for it, and am paralyzed because I don’t think it will look very good in that pattern after all. I give up.

And as a bonus, I am getting the itch to weave again,which entails emptying an awful lot out of Owlet’s cupboard to drag the loom out from under the stairs. I have no idea what I want to make; I just want to be weaving. Because I have so much spare time, of course, and nothing to fill it with.