Today is the first day that I've had in a long time without the GRE hanging over my head. Sure I have a lot to do, and that is daunting, but it's not oppressive in the same way. I'm not claiming that this calm I feel is particularly real but things have lined up in the right way to give me a few days off...
Last night I finished reading the Samuel Delany book that I've been working on for, far too long. I have a pile of other things to read now, and I think I'm going to try and dive in to a short story collection and see how long it takes me to get fed up with that.
Handspun News:
In other news I finished spinning my fiber stash. Which may sound impressive, but I basically worked through everything that I had that I was going to spin two summers ago (I must confess to abandoning a pound of soy silk to R.'s much more impressive fiber stash.) And then I bought a mere 6 ounces of fiber (tencel merino none the less), which constituted my stash. Actually as I think about it, there's a sweater out of my handspun that I'm making very slowly, that has some fiber in the project bag for when I run out of yarn again: so maybe I'm not quite completely out of handspun.
Anyway, this morning I finished plying the last of this 6 ounces of tencel/merino that constituted the bulk of my fiber stash for most of the last year. I think the total yardage was in the end 415 yards. I have no clue what I'd do with it, yet.
This leaves me planning for my next spinning adventure. I'm thinking of buying some white roving and spinning it up, and then finding someone (you know who you are! don't worry, if this is in fact a real plan, it's a long way off. Many moons.) to dye it in exchange for some percentage.
This last spinning accomplishment raises the precepts that I could conceivably--in the not too distant future--spin yarn for my own knitting, and not just a pair of socks, or a hat, or even the occasional bulky sweater that takes years and that I'm constantly avoiding, but the kind of two-color sweaters that are my normal fare. The questions is, do I really want to do that?
You all can feel free to answer that, but I don't really feel like I'm making sweaters that just need to be made out of handspun, and I think it might even be easier to relax if I were knitting with yarn that I knew I could always just buy another skein of at work/a LYS/webs if it ever came to that. And given that, I'm thinking that selling or giving away my handspun is really the way to go. We'll see.
Oh, and there is a movement afoot to take picture of things for ravelry this afternoon, so there will be pictures. Also, additional blogging, I'm thinking.