Way back when, at the Connecticut Sheep and Wool Festival, I bought a pound or so of Shetland fluff to play with.

Courtesy of a sheep named Roger.

I've spun up a bit of laceweight, and am testing the waters of another Gladys Amedro shawl.

It's a bit hairy, though--so I'm not sure this is the yarn's ultimate fate. Or if I want to commit to spinning this much cream-colored laceweight all at once. Maybe I should concentrate on one monster project at a time (yes, I'm looking at you, Princess).

I've been getting a lot of spinning practice in, to the detriment of the knitting. Silly scant 24-hour days. (Although I did start the final center repeat on the Princess shawl! Soon I'll be back to that exciting edging again!)

Anyway, the above specimen is from four ounces of handpainted Blue Faced Leicester in the Raspberry Sherbet colorway from Lone Star Arts. Spun on the wheel--315 yards at 16 wpi.

One ounce of handdyed Shetland roving from The Secret Pocket. Spindle spun--135 yards at 14 wpi. So springy and nice!

Undyed merino laceweight spun on the spindle. 296 yards at 20 wpi.

Fiber festival madness starts here this weekend! However. I must stop thinking about sheep and study for my final exam in cataloging. Must. Study.

But it's so hard with the new toy sitting across the room....

Another small project--A Stork's Nest Scarf by Nancy Bush from the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Piecework magazine. I used a merino laceweight from Fearless Fibers in the colorway Rubicund. Such a pretty and squishy yarn....

Still with the spinning:

The spindle-spun Coopworth from the last entry, plied and finished at approximately 14wpi (fingering weight).

And a pretty Romeldale/CVM blend from a sort-of-local shop (Mocha's Fiber Connection), spun on the spindle, also approximately 14 wpi.

And, as some of you may have anticipated, I was unable to resist aquiring a wheel. It's the folding single treadle, and I bought it from Spunky Eclectic, along with some fabulous fibers that you'll probably see around here in the near future. :)

Hello again!

It's been a while, hasn't it? I've been working on a lot of little projects in addition to the Princess behemoth--above we have the Orchid Mitts by Anne Hanson of Knitspot. These were really fun and they've kept my hands nicely warmed in the chill of the library. I used some leftover KnitPicks Shadow laceweight and knit the shorter version. An excellent pattern, and I expect I'll knit more in the future.

In Princess news, I'm about 80 rows away from finishing the center of the shawl (!). My progress has been a little slower than usual, because I rediscovered my spindle a few weeks ago and have been pretty obsessed with the spinning thing:

The Coopworth roving and spindle were given to me by a very lovely person a while back. It only took me three years or so to get around to using them. :)

And now I can't seem to stop....

Something finished, finally: the South Seas Stole by Laura Patterson. Knit with Heirloom Knitting merino lace yarn on 2.75mm needles. Embellished with size 8/0 silver-lined glass beads from the local bead store.

Even the knitted-on edging was enjoyable with this--I think beads add greatly to the fun. :)

Since I used a finer-than-laceweight yarn, the stole is much shorter than specified in the pattern--about 60 inches rather than 72. I could have added more pattern repeats in any of the lace sections, but I'm just too lazy, I guess.

Now, back to Princess knitting....

I've been knitting from this cone of yarn for over three months, but you'd hardly know by looking at it.

Instead of placing all the live border stitches on holders, I decided to leave them all on the needles and knit back and forth, short-row style. Excellent for picking up and attaching stitches, not so great for progress photography. I think I'm on the seventh repeat of the center motif, but I haven't really counted lately. All I know is, there's a lot there, and there's a lot to be done. :)

At this point in the project, I'm suffering from a lot of yarn envy. Every pretty skein I see for sale on the internet, I want to possess, particularly if it's handpainted, variegated, or striping (hello, Kauni). Normally I would stay away from these kinds of yarn for lace knitting, but I think the endless sea of pale blue has triggered an unexpected rebellion in some part of my subconscious....

So knitting the practice swatch for the laurel leaf insertion was a bit...fraught. I'm not sure how many times I knit it with unsatisfactory results before realizing that the problem was not my tired brain, but rather an error in the chart. For those of you planning to knit the insertion as charted in the 2007 version of the pattern, be warned that there are two extra rows in the chart--I could only make the laurel leaf tips line up properly by skipping from row 7 directly to row 10.

Usually I'm one for charging right ahead in my knitting, but I'm glad I took the sensible swatching route before attempting this seemingly harmless chart over 600+ stitches.... In the end, though, I am very happy with how elegantly this little insertion has turned out.

After the laurel leaf incident, I was a bit cross with the Princess for a couple of days. But now I am well into the center portion and all is forgiven, and sweetness and light have returned. Although I am back to resenting work and classes for getting in the way of my knitting.

Thanks to the three-day weekend bonus knitting time, I completed the Princess border charts. Now for six rows of plain knitting (ew) and the insertion before figuring out the best way to hold all those live stitches while knitting the center.

The South Seas stole is shaping up to be a lot of fun. The beads are nice and shiny, which pleases both me and the little magpie who lives inside me.

This freewheeling knitting pace will surely slow a bit since my spring semester classes start tonight. I've been in denial.

Princess knitting continues smoothly--I passed border row 177 last night, so I think my projections for finishing the border this month will prove accurate. All that knitting and it's still a bit of fluff that can fit with plenty of breathing room in a gallon-size ziploc bag (embarrassingly, my default knitting project carrier).

Much as I love the Princess, however, I am still distractable by new and shiny things.

For example, I just started the South Seas Stole--firstly, because it's pretty, and secondly because it will give me the opportunity to play with lots of pretty blue silver-lined 8/0 beads. (Yarn is Merino Lace from Heirloom Knitting.)

While not exactly shiny, Filatura di Crosa Superior is ridiculously soft. I found it in a yarn store while visiting my mom over the holidays and remembered the tantalizing review published at Knitter's Review last May. It's now well on its way to becoming a scarf with an unwieldy name from Victorian Lace Today.

The princess really isn't a very good travel project, but I did get some work done in between trips to the airport. I've passed the halfway mark for the border and completed row 133 during my I-can't-possibly-face-work-yet day off yesterday.

Incidentally, I broke down and wound some yarn off rather than lugging around the 2-pound cone. This may reduce some of my Crazy Yarn Lady credibility, but I guess I'm ok with that.

Last night I finished border row 74, which means that I'm almost done with Border Chart 1. And yet it is all just a drop in the Princess bucket....

I finished row 42 of the border last night--slow going, as each row takes about 35-40 minutes. But they're 35-40 very enjoyable minutes. :)

It's taken me about a month to get this far--when I did some rough calculations a few weeks ago, I think I determined that it will take me until sometime in January or early February to complete the border. Unless other projects start competing for my attention in the meantime, which is always a danger.

Fortunately, I'm not much of a holiday gift knitter, so no December lace knitting slowdowns for me. The problem will be lugging the two-pound cone of yarn around with me when flying home for the holidays....

Well, I did study a little over the long weekend. Grudgingly. But I also started the Princess border. (Yes, I decided to go with the 62-point edging--so far, so good!)

I have to admit, 868 stitches per row is a lot. I know that the Wedding Ring Shawl border had more, but I guess the memory has faded already.

The semester is almost over, so I will be free to knit Princess at will for the next month or so. :) Limiting myself to one row per night after class is very painful...

41 edging repeats completed on the Princess as of last night. Soon I will have to decide whether to do the 62-repeat edging or the 85-repeat edging. I'm leaning toward the former....

Meanwhile, knitting on all other fronts has slowed or stopped. Although I did drag out a few mitten books last night. A knitter has no excuse for walking around with a hole in her glove, right?

The Princess shawl pattern arrived on Saturday. I managed to hold out a couple of hours before the urge to cast on became overwhelming. :)

The yarn I'll be using (I think) is a light blue gossamer wool/silk blend acquired on eBay. I have a completely ridiculous amount of it--about 2.25 pounds at 16,000 yards per pound. The label inside the cone indicates that it is a Lane Borgosesia yarn, dated 1992. Not quite vintage.

I put that qualification in the preceding paragraph only because I haven't yet received the Jamieson & Smith Shetland Supreme samples I ordered. It may be fabulous enough to change my whole outlook on the shawl... Or not. In the meantime, I've completed six edging points in the wool/silk on 1.75 mm (00) needles. I might have gotten further, but I kept getting distracted by the imaginative and acrobatic slaughter of 300. On-screen testosterone overload and lace knitting mix about as well as you'd think they would...