I'm not dead yet.

Can it really have been four weeks since I last posted? I guess it must be. It’s been a bit crazy (birthday parties, holiday, and then the state caught fire) with not a lot of knitting or spinning. But here’s what I’ve done since we last met:

Fiber: 

The top is silk, the "green" is cotton, and the bottom is llama.
A friend saw this picture and said it looks like a monkey. Now I can't not see the monkey.

I decided to try out some of the non-wool fibers I bought a while ago. I have a new appreciation for cotton clothing. Cotton is hard to spin! I tend to make overspun yarn, not always the best way to spin, but it is a good tendency to have if you are working with cotton. The staple length is so short you have to add a lot of twist just to keep the fibers together.

Silk (white) and cotton (green) fibers.

After spinning a bit of cotton I decided that I wanted to try to spin some silk, and that felt completely different.

Projects:

I’ve stalled out on the baby blanket. I’m a little over an 8th of the way through it. Not because the blanket isn’t interesting, I just got... distracted. I've made a crocheted scarf for a co-worker who was changing jobs. I remembered to take pictures of it before I gave it away; I just didn’t take very good ones.

It was windy.

At first I wanted to make a crocheted shawl, but the patterns weren’t working, and the yarn fought back. So I decided that a scarf, in one of my favorite yarns, would be just the thing.

Here's what it looks like when it's not moving.

I’ve made a few of these scarves, and they never fail to please. 

I’d promised a few people handmade items at the beginning of the year. It’s September and I still haven’t made one, so I found the yarn I’d picked out for one and thought, “I’ll bang this out over a weekend or two.”

Sometimes, I forget that I’m not the Yarn Harlot (see her recent one-a-day baby knits) and that I can’t actually “bang” anything out. So I’m halfway through the first gift and it’s feeling a little bit small. I think once I block it out (never mind that the yarn is washable and so doesn't block) it will fit the recipient. I hope. I’ll show pictures once I’ve given it away.

I’ve still got two more of these promised handmade items to make before I start on Christmas gifts. I may be crocheting gifts this year.