It’s time for another cop-out entry. These happen when I have essentially nothing intelligent to say, and run around with the digital camera taking pictures.

The weather is crap. Seriously, it just can’t decide what to do. Right now, it’s somewhere around 70F, muggy, cloudy and gray, and looks like rain, but it’s not raining and I’m not sure it’s going to. Crap weather for photos. Grrrr.

I did do some spinning over the past couple of evenings, however. I’m way behind on my to-spin pile! It’s horrible! And I threw a rod on the hopped-up Camaro, er, I mean, after 8 zillion miles of yarn, I have to replace a part on my fastest wheel, so it’s waiting on parts. The horror. But as my better half put it, with almost a straight face, “The good news is, I think you have 9 other wheels.”

Which, well, is true. I removed this bobbin, in progress at the time…

…and, walking about 10 feet, grabbed another wheel with which it is totally compatible.

You gotta have the “totally compatible systems” thing going on, you see?

Now, okay, I did break a few cardinal rules I shouldn’t break, though. One, I didn’t have the parts on hand. I really should have. I’ve gotten lazy what with having, you know, 9 or 10 other wheel choices. But honestly, I should be ashamed, and I should know better. I have the new Julia up in my office doing some production sock yarn work, which is tying up all 8 or 9 of the Louet bobbins I presently have (so there’s another cardinal rule broken: never tie up all your bobbins entirely), I don’t like to use the Journey Wheel while sitting in the rocking recliner, the Roberta is just too loud at speed and not so great for laceweight, I think the folding Fricke is behind a few bumps of midgrade wools, this wasn’t a charkha project… good thing I had the Saxonie handy, right?

Right.

It’s 550 yards from 48 grams of merino/silk/yak/cashmere. Totally all mine, even if it is on the pink side. Penny will kick your butt if you try to run off with it. Just look at her — can’t you tell she’s totally an enforcer type cat?

Or perhaps you can tell this is the cop-out blog entry where I run around with the camera making it look like I did something.

But, anyway, I’ve done some other spinning too. Like, I did finish one of the sock yarns. This one is cabled and self-striping and stuff. It’s SWTC Karaoke and it’s really, really cool. I swatched a bit of leftover cable:

…and would need to do the socks on a smaller needle. Which is a bummer because this swatch was done on US 2 needles. Oy.

And if you’ve been reading this blog long, you’ll have realized by now that for totally mysterious reasons, I seem to do a lot of “lilac” at this time of year.

It’s merino/silk/cashmere tweed. I think Amy has some similar ones left for sale.

I almost opted to make it a singles. But, no.

It’ll look a lot nicer once the sun comes out and it’s all the way dry. With 196 yards here, this’ll be a scarf for me, I think.

Stupid lack of sun. Stupid muggy cloudy weather. Why am I even thinking about warm things? Right, because this is what I do.

Paimei is trapped behind a screen. He hates that. He’d love to be allowed outside, but he’s just too glaringly white and, well, let’s just say he got the looks and the personality but the brains? Not so much.

Then too, there’s this. It’s a problem tussah silk from last summer. I loved the colours, but didn’t trust the brown (and with reason — one other test project I did with silk dyed with that same brown had definite excess dye issues). So I set it aside to use on something for me. I have a project for it. If it can be done in time.

And if I don’t decide to use Daffodil here instead.

Crap! I’m so glad we just talked about that, because…

I totally threw the Daffodil silk singles into the sink to soak, and forgot about them. I’d better run, folks.

Oh, before I forget, there’s some maintenance work going on with my abbysyarns.com email today. Your mail to it, if you send any, will be deferred briefly during that maintenance. If you urgently need to mail me, use afranquemont at yahoo.com — just today, 2 May 2008. By this evening, things ought to be back to normal and I should have a nice backlog to sort. Perhaps I should plan for that with a beer run this afternoon, eh?