The official adoption form for the Icelandic sheep Jag is adopting for me came in the mail today. Her name is Arowin. Isn’t she a cutie????

This past week was completely awful from a work perspective; far worse for Jag than for me, but still all-around crappy for both of us, since it’s hard to not be affected when the person you’re living with is working around the clock, getting on conference calls at 10pm and again at 2am and again at 7:30am, and generally being stretched to the limit by stress and sleep deprivation. Things have settled down again, thankfully, and we did manage to salvage a good part of the weekend with Geek Beer, a really great bellydance performance at the Carolina Theatre, a very fun gaming session, and a nice dinner out at the Federal (mmmm, carnitas). Jag isn’t even twitching any more. Much.

I got basically no crafty stuff done for most of the week, but I ended up doing a lot of spinning this weekend while Jag was otherwise occupied working. This is 2-ply sock yarn spun from a batt that Michelle gave me as a housewarming gift. I don’t think she had a colorway name for it, so I’ve called it “Red Skies at Night” because it has such great sunset colors. It turned out to be sport weight at around 14-16wpi, which is what I was aiming for (I’m not a fan of really thin sock yarns). Not sure on yardage, but it’s about 5oz of yarn, so I’m sure there’s plenty there for socks. I dunked and thunked it this morning after plying, and it dried in just a few hours in the nice breezes we had today. From a distance, it reads as solid purple, but close up you can see all the red/blue areas.

From the batt….

….to the singles….

….to the yarn

My birthday was on Thursday, but this entire weekend has been an extended celebration. Me and Jag both had the day off from work on Thursday, and we took advantage of the unusually warm and sunny weather for a hike at Eno.

There are male dryads! Who knew???

Lots of stuff was in bud and being all green and springlike (I hope the baby leaves make it through tonight’s snow!).

Jag got me some cute froggie cupcakes. I made him eat all the sad ones.

We also went to see “Coraline”, which I highly recommend. We skipped the 3-D version because those always give me a headache or make me feel nauseous, and I don’t feel like I missed out on anything. The animation was amazing.

My parents made a yummy birthday dinner on Saturday with lasagna rollups and meatballs. Greg made his famous 3-layer carrot cake with buttermilk glaze and cream cheese frosting. It was, um, festively adorned with a variety of decorations.

I got lots of great gifts, including jewelry, booze, froofy soap, a cool candleholder, booze…

…some awesome crocheted flower pins my mom made with some sock yarn leftovers I had given her months ago, and then forgotten about…

..and Robin made me a cool hanging paper sculpture.

Today we went to Chapel Hill for a craft day with some friends we hadn’t seen in several months, and got to see the cool projects they’ve been working on, including some really pretty stained glass. I got a fair amount knitted on my sweater, too. And we had potato pancakes for dinner. Yay!

I’ve been knitting along on the Liesl sweater designed by Ysolda (who has several other designs I want to make), and it turns out it’s going to fit! Plus, I’ve only used 2 skeins out of the 6 I have, so I’ll definitely have enough yarn for the body and 3/4 length sleeves.

I couldn’t mange to not have a completely stupid expression for the self-timer, so I gave up.

It’s not often that you get to see the backs of your own elbows. They look weird. Should I get an elbow lift?

I got my hair cut on Friday. It had been between 3-4 years since my last haircut, and it was way overdue. Since I’ve never colored my hair, aside from some unfortunate experiments with Sun-In back in the 80s (“reddish results may occur in dark brown hair” is an understatement) I decided to do that too. There’s only so much effect that dye can have on hair as dark as mine (a level 3 out of 10 according to the stylist, with 1 being black), so my hair has subtle red/purple cast, but nothing dramatic. And all the gray hairs are now covered, assuming there were any gray hairs, which of course there weren’t! Ahem. The cut is your standard shoulder-length bob.

Jag took some pictures for me yesterday. I’d forgotten how flyaway short hair can get when the humidity is low! I definitely need to get some kind of leave-in conditioner or something.

Smiley.

Getting grumpy with the picture-taking thing.

From the side.

I’ll post pictures of my hair later, after I’ve showered. For now, spinning news!

Mom’s February handspun has been dunked and thunked (I’m tired of saying “washed and whacked”) and is dry and ready to go. It turned out very springlike with all the green, pink and purple.

Last night I thought about doing some spinning for myself, so I had the sock batts Michelle gave me piled up on the love seat next to my wheel. It turned out that I was too tired to bother, so Jag suggested we put the batts somewhere safe where the kitties wouldn’t bother them. I stacked them on the dining room table, pushed all the chairs in to keep the cats from jumping up there, and went to bed. Well.

Hmmmm.

“What? This isn’t my new mattress?”

“Fine, I’m going, I’m going!”

Once I kicked Shastes’s little gray butt off the batts, I started spinning them. After doing several rounds of singles for 2-ply worsted yarns, it’s fun to spin a bit thinner. I’m going to do this yarn as 2-ply as well, hopefully a heavy fingering to sport weight. The colors are a nice tweedy looking red/blue/violet, with occasional short runs of one color or another. Should make some nice socks!

Working from home is great, especially if you have an early morning outage that can be easily done remotely, and you don’t feel like being showered and breakfasted and at work before 7am. However, the house is fraught with temptations. There’s the fridge full of food, of course. (We won’t talk about the beer, cider and mead that are also in the fridge.)

Then there’s the in-progress knitting.

And the partially plied yarn on the wheel.

And the cute kitties scattered around the house, wanting snuggles.

I managed to resist, but it wasn’t easy.

It turns out that Jag makes a fine roasted potato and steak dinner, so he can no longer say that he can’t cook. I made some pretty tasty banana pudding for dessert using the classic custard recipe on the box of Nilla wafers, and it involved making my first meringue (I think). I’ve whipped up egg whites for other stuff, but since I don’t like lemon meringue pies, I think I’ve avoided making a real meringue for most of my life. It turned out well, and just to be sure we were getting enough cholesterol, I made some whipped cream to go on top (not pictured, erp).

This weekend has been fun but not terribly productive, although I did finish spinning the singles for mom’s February dose of handspun. I love how different the two bobbins look, although they’re from the same braid of fiber; it should make a nice contrasty 2-ply.

The fiber:

The bobbins of singles:

Steak, nanner pudding, and my sweetie in a kilt. It doesn’t get any better.

My parents made the trip from Wake Forest today to visit me and Jag and see the house. We had a nice lunch, and mom brought over the in-progress afghan she’s crocheting with the handspun I gave her for Christmas. This is why I love giving my mom handspun! She made a gorgeous scarf/stole with some of my first handspun, and she’s making a beautiful project with this batch, too! I think this is the perfect pattern for setting off the yarn. I gave her the January yarn today and I started spinning the February shipment this afternoon. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

The weather was so nice that me and Jag went for a walk, and afterwards we checked the mailbox, which we’d forgotten to do on Saturday. What to my wondering eyes should appear but a package from HLF! It’s lovely carded Jacob wool that she’s been processing from a fleece. It’s so soft, and smells wonderful (aside from the nice wooly smell) from whatever she washed it in. Thanks so much HLF! (And thanks for the yummy chocolate, Bennett!) Your item is being readied and should be able to ship out by Tuesday.

Lest I forget, I also got a lovely batt from Michelle recently. It’s wool and (soysilk? Correct me here) for spinning into sock yarn. I’ll start on this after my mom’s February handspun is done.

I’ve been working some more on unpacking craft room stuff. After a couple failed attempts involving some of those Command Adhesive hooks (don’t ask) I have my braided rovings hanging on a line from a couple of hefty ceiling hooks. If these pull out of the wall, I’ll try drilling into the ceiling beams and installing 1-8 steel eye bolts.

I’m also doing some sock knitting, just an easily memorized pattern that doesn’t compete with the variegated yarn and can be knit while fighting frost giants and ogres.