Weekend activities

[infryq]

This weekend, I:

• Finished an ounce of shetland yarn, my first contact with the breed
  
• Finished 25g of a slub + spiral yarn (called a "flame" yarn) for my spinning study group
  
• Blocked and finished a lace hipscarf that's been languishing in my knitting bag for 2 years. First time pinning out lace, pretty fun.
  
• Had tea with some DC friends in town for Carnival
  
• Swatched & blocked some lace stitches for a shawl I want to make out of 4 oz of fingering/sport yarn I made in a dark purple-gray color called "woodsmoke"
  
• Did two passes on a woodburned pattern I'm putting on the hand carders I got for a class I'm taking in May
  
• Used said hand carders on some wool-alpaca roving I bought at Pgh Knit & Crochet Festival that was fussy to draft semi-worsted and semi-longdraw. Rolags, man. So fluffy. Fun to draft, working much better, and the carding makes it easy to pick out the unfortunately ample vegetable matter in the roving. No wonder it was a good price...
  
• Impulse-bought a pound of hand-dyed fiber split among three different types I've never spun before, including some sock blends I'm excited about
  
• Turned an old tshirt into a drawstring bag for the part of a raw icelandic fleece that helped cushion my spinning wheel
  
• Plied some commercial mercerized cotton into an 8-way cable to use for the drawstring
  
• Filled another steamer tray with potting soil, wet it, and planted seeds for Weld, Bright Lights Cosmos, and Cranberry Cosmos
  
• Let the baby Hollyhocks and Coreopsis sit on the (shaded) back porch for an hour in the warmth
  
• Walked P through some tricky jQuery for a two-level menu
  

(Pictured, L-R from top: shetland fiber, shetland yarn, hand cards, slub single, plied flame yarn, flame closeup, lace being blocked, woodsmoke yarn, woodsmoke swatch)