Fiber Monday - Knitting progress

We're all actually fine. I seem to have a bit of PTSD regarding property taxes and spent all last week catastrophizing. I'm doing better. I think.

But that's not fun to talk about so let's move onto something that is. 

The to-do list has been long, so I haven't been making things as much as usual. I did get back to my loom this week. I decided not to take a picture because when something is on the loom, it all kind of looks the same. I'm nearly done with the dishtowel I'm currently working on. When I get to the next one I'll take another picture.

As we drove to Indiana this past weekend, I got a bit of knitting done. Here are the sweater pieces I have so far.

This is the back and the two front pieces laid out shoulder to shoulder. This means I just have two sleeves left to knit as well as sewing it all up and adding on the neck and button band. My goal is to get everything blocked this week so I can sew it together while we're away. I'm also going to knit the sleeves as the same time. Knowing I won't have to cast-on a second sleeve will encourage me to just get them done. The end is in sight! 

As a side note, I really overestimated how much yarn I needed to spin for this so consequently, have probably another sweater's worth of yarn leftover. I'll have to figure out what to do with it.

The other thing I did this week was get around to wet finishing the skeins of yarn I had piling up. 

Here's something interesting. So in the photo up above, all the blue yarn is that Polwarth/silk blend I had been spinning. The skein there on the end is the grey yarn from the raw fleece I got at Christmas. All of them were wrapped on the same niddy-noddy so have the same length of fiber in each of them. But because of the different characteristics of the different sheep breeds, plus the addition of the silk in the blue, the amount of bounce in them is very different. 

[Don't you love fiber-related terms? A niddy-noddy is a tool for measuring out a skein of yarn. They are usually made of wood with a shorter piece of wood across the top and the bottom that you wrap the yarn around. The top and the bottom are at right angles to each other so that you can wrap a complete circle of yarn. It's actually really difficult to explain... Google an image of one if this doesn't make sense.]

Here is a close-up of that grey yarn. You can see how springy it is even though this is so thin it is just barely measuring at a fingering weight. 

Finally, here is the dyed alpaca all dry. I think I'm going to have to card it all to make it spinnable. I'm trying to decide if I want to drag my cards with me or just stuff a bunch of the undyed alpaca in a bag and take that. My goal is to create a three-ply yarn with a mixture of the dyed and natural alpaca. (You can see the ball of the natural alpaca that I finished.) What do you think? Two plied of the natural and one ply of the green or vice versa. I kept notes about how I dyed the alpaca, so in theory I should be able to match it fairly closely. In theory. 

I can't quite decide. I'm going to need multiple balls of each to make enough finished yarn to do something with it, so it really doesn't matter at this point. I guess what I'll work on during our vacation will ultimately come down to how I'm feeling at the exact moment of packing.

Finally, because everyone knows I need more projects, I have found what I want to make after I'm done with the socks which come after the sweater. Check out the Interlochen shawl by Sunday Knits. I am in love with it. The cables... the bands to tuck the ends into so it doesn't fall off... the general squishiness of it. I have a pound of undyed merino combed top that would be perfect for it. I should even have a quarter of a pound leftover. Now I just have to decide what color to dye it. 

So many projects...