Well. I haven’t blogged in a while because I’ve been too busy and life has been sucking. Now life is sucking less, and I will present you with some thrilling updates.

First off, I got a letter from my sheep. Or more correctly, from the nice people at the farm where my sheep lives. There was a brief rundown on the Icelandic sheep breed (for example, they have little herding instinct due to the lack of natural predators in Iceland, and they aren’t very social with people), and a little info on Arowin in particular. She’s 3 years old and her previous lambs have all been boys, too.

Here’s Arowin, looking sheared and uddertastic.

And here’s Arowin with her little ramlets, which I get to name! I’m thinking Magnus and Karl sound like good Icelandic names.

I finished spinning up some bulky 2-ply merino in eye-bending colors. It’s huggable and squishy. Jag suggests using it to make cheerful mittens for this winter when the colorless blahs set in, and this sounds like a great idea. Maybe with some black Lamb’s Pride for the cuffs as a contrast.

This is a sock which will not become finished. I don’t know what its problem is. The cuff is short, the yarn is not particularly thin, the pattern is simple, but I’ve been working on it for months. At this rate the pair will be done in Q2 of 2011.

I have a fabric tote bag that I carry my knitting in, but I store the individual projects in plastic grocery bags that inevitably disintegrate and spill pencils, cable needles, instructions, stitch counters, and everything else useful into the bigger bag, which is full of so much crap that I have to dump the entire contents to find anything, Since I refuse to spend $20 on a GoKnit pouch, I whipped up a little lined drawstring bag to contain my current sock project. It’s stupid, simple but really useful things like this that make me happy. The only cord I had in the house was some grabby leather rawhide, but once that’s replaced with something more slidey, it’ll be perfect. I need to make a bigger one for my current sweater project. (The Egyptian fabric is left over from a wall quilt I made for my mom in the late 90’s. I never throw nuthin’ away!)

And now, the biggest news, which is my new toy. The fabulous HLF decided to ditch her current drum carder for a new, nicer one, and asked me if I wanted to buy it. Less than a week later, I was the proud owner of a Louet Roving Carder!

It looks like this:

The night I opened it, Jag and I set it up on my craft table upstairs and started feeding semi-craptastic compacted wool top from a Dyepot.com grab bag into it. We made 2 little test batts, each made with ONE pass through the carder. (If you own a carder, you know that one pass is sadly insufficient, but I was impatient and ignorant.)

Throwing caution and good sense to the wind, I immediately spun and plied the one on the left. Given the total rush job and the neppy, tangled, unfinished state of the batt, it came out much prettier than it had any right to, and I was encouraged to card, card, card some more.

The first 2 “real” batts were shades of brown with blues, purples and pinks added in (including the brown/teal batt above, which got thrown back into the carder and remixed). I’ve always been spinning-from-batts-challenged, since I find that I make a huge mess when stripping batts for spinning and end up with stands of loose fiber floating everywhere. I stumbled across this tip on making rolags from batts on the Spunky Eclectic blog, and it has worked really well.

Rolaglike objects:

The brown tweedy result:

I of course wanted to make more batts, and in colors that less closely resembled dryer lint, so I sorted some more of the dyepot.com grab bag and made one purple/violet/blue and one orange/pink/yellow batt. These are about 1.25-1.5 oz each. Once I get a wallpaper brush for the carder to smooth the fiber on the drum, making 2oz batts should not be a problem.

Perl is thrilled with the drum carder, too.

I’m planning to use up the rest of the grab bag fiber for batt experiments and will hopefully make a colorful Justify shawl with the yarn.

The End