Slacker R I

Maryland Sheep and Wool is coming up at the beginning of May and I'm hoping to go. The only problem is I HAVE NO ROOM FOR MORE ANYTHING. My two plastic tubs are full and I have several cardboard boxes packed with roving--one less since I've now actually spun most of what I got at MSWF last year--waiting to be dyed and spun or just spun, depending on my whim. The past two weeks have been busy wheel-wise, but there's been precious little knitting going on. I don't know why, but when the weather gets nice and sunny, the wheel starts whispering to me while the knitting bag gets left on the siding. That Evil Ambition sweater is never going to be finished... sigh.

Here we have Exhibit A. Last summer, Barb came over to help get all dyed and dirty with wool, and after scratching our heads and trying to figure out what could possibly go with the brown/gray of the Navajo Churro wool, I chose green and yellow. The original dye job was fairly streaky and made the roving resemble a diminutive hay bail. After it spent the next two days hanging up in the bathroom to dry, I left it alone for eight months while I was busy knitting and being otherwise delinquent in regard to my spinning wheel. Last week, though, I fished it out of the cardboard box and.. well, you can see the result. This stuff is so fuzzy! Is that what spinners mean when they talk about a halo? I dubbed it "Leaves of Grass"; it reminds me of.. well, that sould be fairly self-explanatory..
And here we have Exhibit B. This, alas, did not come from MSWF. It's mill end roving from Sheep Shed Studio, which also got a nifty new dye job and sat in a box for eight months before I decided to start spinning it. It was a lot easier to draft than the Navajo. It was also considerably less fuzzy and didn't shed bits of itself all over the front of my clothes the way the other stuff did. The dye job was dark red and black on a white background. Spun into singles, it looked a little bit like the striations on some kind of jasper, which is what I named it. Plied with itself, it looks a bit less like the original striations, but to me it still looks like some kind of jasper.
And, last but not least, we have Exhibit C, which did come from MSWF and was part of the dye session with Barb. The roving, she thought, looked like lemon meringue pie smeared with blackberry jam. Spun into singles, it looks like crocuses, which is what I though I'd call it. Alas, however, when I plied it with itself, that lovely crocusy interplay was lost and now it looks pretty awful. I'm hoping to correct this by overdyeing it with red, which should intensify the purple and turn the yellow into orange. In theory, that is.
What I'll do with all this yarn, in addition to what's already in my stash--I've long since reached the SABLE stage and have jokingly told Barb I'll leave her my yarn in my will if I should happen to die an untimely death--is a mystery. Oh, I'm sure I'll actually knit some of it into something useful, but the rest might just end up being mailed off to parts unknown.

Something funny just happened. Queen Bean is old and cranky, and she barks for no reason at all, especially when there's nothing going on outside. She did that just now and I went down to investigate in case there happened to be a cat at the door or something. I threw open the door and--surprise!--there was a college student standing there. I really didn't expect there to be anyone standing there, so I screamed because I was so surprised. He was very nice about it and said his dog barks at nothing all the time, too. Poor kid. Probably had no idea he was going to get screamed at in the line of duty.

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