Weekending

Courtesy of some not-great weather this weekend, we had quite a bit of quiet time, which was nice!  I was a bit under the weather this weekend, so I didn't mind having some extra hot tea and I made my go-to comfort food recipe of butternut squash soup.

For the first time in a LONG time, I also sat and did some focused spinning.  I plied up the BFL I showed you on Friday and got a nice squishy skein of worsted weight.

I also started singles on a braid of soft and lovely merino/bamboo from FatCatKnits in the "Splash" colorway.

I want to spin this up into a fingering weight yarn and use it for 1 of the 2 colors in a shawl.  I'm going to dye up a complementary braid of the same base - probably using my "Serpent" colorway from the last Mythical Creatures spinner's club - and work up Andrea's Shawl.

Speaking of which, have you seen the fantastic new book collection out from Kirsten Kapur of Through The Loops.  I've been a friend and fan of Kirsten's for a lot of years.  She's done many shawl patterns for my clubs over that time, and I can honestly say that there really is nothing she's designed I haven't loved and wanted to knit, but my time to knit for fun has been fairly curtailed this past year and I really wanted to get back into knitting things without a deadline that just sparked my interest.

I ran into another blogger's post (which I sadly cannot find now and didn't think to bookmark it) in which she is planning on knitting Kirsten's Mystery Shawl-Along 2015 (as am I) and then work her way through all of the Shawl Book One collection.  I thought that was a brilliant idea and once I get a wild hare like that, you know where I'm going with this, right? I thought it'd be GREAT fun to do up a handspun version of each of the shawls.  It'll challenge me a bit with the spinning (for instance, Laight Street is a bulky weight, which I rarely if ever spin) and that'll be good for me AND help me work down my stash, which is another goal of mine for this year.   I'm not putting any deadlines on this project.  I want it to be fun and not work.

I'm really looking forward to this as a long-term process kind of project but I'm also looking forward to a stack of hand-knit/hand-spun shawls at the end of the road too!

And PS - Just for Andi, a Lizzie picture.  She's almost 4 months now and is a bundle of muscle.   I've started thinking of her as "Tank".  Shown here with one of the bazillion sticks she likes to haul around when we go outside to play.