Finis!

I've got several finished items to show you today. First up is the final Lantern Moon skein.

It took me what felt like forever to ply this stuff up. At least four evenings of solid 2 hr plying sessions. But I'm pretty happy with the finished product - I like the colors alot more then I thought I would when I started off.

I ended up with 467 yds of fingering weight yarn (18 wpi)! That is such a change from the weight I was spinning before - I'm not sure how I managed to go from heavy worsted to fingering while skipping over the intervening weights, but I now understand why folks say it's harder to spin thick then thin. The biggest difference in what I did with this yarn (versus Cricket) was to prep all the top at once, predrafting each section and then winding up two big balls of fiber to spin. That meant that once I started spinning, I could just keep going without needed to stop and prep more fiber. The best part of the spinning was watching how the colors changed. This was also the worst part of the plying - I seperated the top by color repeats and was hoping to get them to line up in the finished yarn. Mmmm...not so much. But this stuff is still very pretty, and will make good Silly Socks* for Devil.

And here is another FO,

blocked and awaiting delivery to my grandmother for her birthday. I'll try and get a good shot of her modeling it this weekend. The blocking process was greatly assisted by a freshly washed Boo:

(It looks like she's smiling in this photo, but really she's starting to wail)

This is my first fiber-to-FO project, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. And the process of knitting with yarn I had made myself was really a special one. I also found the variability of the yarn worked well with the lace pattern and kept things interesting. I'm not going to put a moratorium on all mill-spun yarn for future projects, especially for something with a lot of stockinette, but I'm liking the handspun stuff alot.

Here's a final, unfortunately framed shot of the Lantern Moon for you. Probably no Fiber Friday this week since the girls and I will be in NC for Granny's birthday (cross your fingers for me for the plane ride tomorrow afternoon!), but I'll be back next week, hopefully with more stuff cleared off the needles. I'm getting some fall sweater startitis around here!

* Every Friday Devil's classroom does something different, for example wearing pajamas to school. Last week Friday was Silly Sock day. I found out about this on Wednesday at 5:15 pm, and spent more time then I care to admit trying to calculate how much sleep I would have to give up in order to knit her some Silly Socks by 7:00 am Friday morning. Needless to say, I came to my senses and ended up putting embroidery floss bows all over a pair of socks she already had. She was quite taken with the idea of silly socks, however, so there's another project to add to the list.