Lovely Things

I am blessed with lots of lovely things. First, I finished spinning and plying the wonderful orangey yarn that was my first Year of Fiber project. It is really, really gorgeous. I’m not going to ruin my feelings about this yarn by actually counting up the yardage just yet. For now, I am just admiring its loveliness. Ravelry membership has gotten me more excited about spinning through my stash this year. I added pictures of all my fibers to my fibertory on the site, and I was so excited to transfer the new yarn from my fiber stash to my actual stash, mark the spinning project complete, and move on to the next. I decided to try to spin up more of the fibers I got longer ago, so I turned to this gorgeous teal Blue-Faced Leicester wool. I see why people love to spin with this stuff; I’m spinning it so lovely and fine with my tiny spindle to make some really gorgeous yarn. I’m doing the Navajo-ply-as-you-go method for this one since the singles are so fine. That also means I know what my final yarn looks like, and I’ll preserve the color changes when I get to some. (The fiber has all different values of teal within it.) It is turning into some mighty lovely yarn.

It may seem unbelievable to you, Dear Reader, after seeing just how lovely the yarns are turning out, but the most lovely thing in this photo is the new wireless keyboard! I adore my new iPad Mini to bits, but typing on the screen was not fun. Now I have the Logitech K760 solar-powered keyboard with arrow keys and everything! All of my quotes and special characters are just where I expect them to be, without having to hunt and peck through extra layers of virtual buttons. It’s light-weight and small enough to be really portable. Now I just need a decent writing app for the iPad, and I can spend my Saturday mornings biking to the coffeeshop in my super-cool writing lifestyle! (And since it can pair to multiple Apple devices, I’ve also paired it to my Dear Husband’s iPad, and I can play tricks on him from time to time! “Why does my iPad keep jumping to the home screen?” Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!!)

New Year, New iPad!

I am posting this from my brand new iPad. I got it last Monday for my birthday (which isn’t for a couple more weeks), and I have spent every minute of spare time on it! My Dear Husband says that you eventually get tired of playing those stupid free games, but that seems hard to believe at this point, with a Tiny Death Star and Hay Day and Flow free calling to me. But there are also some cool educational apps, too, like Duolingo. I’ve ordered a keyboard, and I plan to use this for my future writing endeavors, if I think I can stop playing games for five minutes! It is also fairly easy to post blog entries on the iPad, so if I am able to close down the games, maybe you’ll see a few posts now and then.

Since I’ve done nothing fiber-related all week, I can only update you on the progress I made over the holidays. After knitting all those hats in the last post, my wrists were too sore to be knitting for a while, so it took a break and spun instead. I finished off the entire pigeon-colored wool, ordered from KnitPicks and finished with an ordinary two-ply. It came out quite nice, if a bit short.

I might order some more of the same, so I’ll have decent yardage (it was so very pleasant to spin), but I have to wait until I manage to spin a bit more yarn and do a yarnventory.

Also completed during the break was the light purple half of my bag of two-colored fiber. This was a lot less pleasant to spin, though it got better after discovering that Navajo ply trick. This fiber was Romney, I think, purchased from Delly’s Delights Farm at the Sheep and Wool Festival. I’m thinking of making a scarf or small shawl, if there’s enough yarn. The two colors have flecks of the other in them, so they match perfectly. The yarn came out lovely, and quite nubbly. I really like spinning!