I realize I never really put up a good picture of the skeins of contest yarn - an egregious oversight indeed! Just to remind you, this is 8oz (more or less) of shetland wool that Jess and I dyed with Koolaid and spun up for her contest benefitting the Relay for Life. I really enjoyed working with it; it had a great crimpy texture and it was very soft and sheepy-smelling. I ended up with two skeins, one of which made a lap at the Relay. They're a chunky weight, a little bit thick-and-thin, and still soft and sheepy.
The color is a little off in both pictures - the actual yarn is not so pink as the first one, and not so washed-out as the second one. You can picture it, right?
While I'm on the topic of handspun . . .
Here are those mitered mittens I've been working on. They took three tries to finally be something I was happy with. Well, mostly happy with, but I'll get there in a minute.
The first time I showed you these mittens was Take 1, the pair that were too tight. I went up a couple needle sizes (size 6 to size 8) and knit Take 2. This time, I was unhappy with the way the colors looked. This particular skein of handspun had been navajo-plied, to keep the colors together. The result was long repeats of color; the mitten had a purple cuff, a while hand, and a bit of yellow right at the fingertip. It looked like the Easter Bunny's version of candy corn, and who knows what the second mitten might have looked like. It's too bad - those long repeats would have been great in a Baby Surprise Jacket, but I didn't have enough yarn for that. Anyway, I solved the problem by winding the yarn into two balls and doing narrow stripes.
So what was I unhappy with? Well, I chose to do afterthought thumbs (which I liked a lot, being someone who chronically does not leave enough space between the thumb and the base of the fingers), but this is how much yarn I had left after both mittens:
Enough for two thumbs? I crossed my fingers and snipped.
And no. It was enough for about 1 1/3 thumbs. The second one was finished off with some undyed worsted weight. They look okay, but their gift potential has been seriously impaired. They certainly can't go to a nonknitter now.
The last project I want to show you is a quick baby hat I made with some of the yarn I've spun recently. I say baby hat, but it ended up as a doll hat. I am just continually afflicted with Yarn Shortage.
Ah well. The solution must be to spin more, right?
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