Times, they are a changin'.

It's been insanely busy around Casa de Solitary Knitter.  It's a long story, but we're in the process of moving my mother in law in with us.  My father in law passed away in July and things have been going downhill health wise for her ever since.  It's for both monetary and health reasons that she's coming to stay with us.  So, we've been cleaning, decluttering and spending time at her house packing things up.  We also have to get our garage cleaned out so we have storage room and our yard cleaned because...it just really needs to be cleaned.  It hasn't left much time for being solitary, nor knitting.

I have been sneaking moments here and there, mostly late at night or sometimes mid-morning before we get to work, spinning and knitting.  I haven't done any spinning in awhile and decided it would be a way to get some fiber fun in in small increments.  I can spin for ten or fifteen minutes at a time and stop abruptly without worrying about where I left off.  I use a 1.6 ounce purpleheart wood top whorl spindle that my dear Aunt Loretta bought for me at our local yarn shop, The Spinster.  She and my cousin Rita were in town to visit and took me down there as a surprise and let me pick out a few things I wanted.  It was an incredibly thoughtful gift and one that continues to give as I use it to spin yarns out of beautiful fibers.  I'm what I'd consider a very newbie spinner - I don't know a whole lot and my yarns are far from perfect.  But with every little bit I practice, the better my consistency gets.

Here's a picture of my spindle.  I think she's beautiful!

There's a group on Ravelry called Yarn Stormers.  People suggest a person to get a random box of yarn goodness and if you're chosen, you receive a surprise box chock full of all sorts of balls and skeins and hanks of yarn, as well as, on occasion, fiber to spin.  In the box I received (I was nominated by my good friend Jen in Las Vegas) there was a few ounces of a green so dark I thought it was black until I held it up to the light.  I'd say it's a mid-quality wool; not the best I've spun, but certainly not the worst - a good workhorse fiber.  I'm currently spinning it pretty fine (by my standards), near a laceweight.  I'll be plying it I think, into a fingering/heavy fingering 2-ply.

Beyond that, I've been working on a scrappy modular square afghan.  I like it because:

• The squares are only 29 stitches.  They can be finished in less than 20 minutes of solid knitting.
• Each square uses very little yarn.
• I can use up a ton of my odds and ends.
• I'm finding all sorts of colors to add to it as I clean my craft room and neaten my stash.
• No sewing the squares together.  You pick up stitches off the squares already knit and knit the new squares directly on to the afghan.  If you weave the ends in as you go, there's really no finishing!

Most of my stash is acrylic, and as a downside, as these squares are  stockinette, they're trying to curl.  Since the squares are put together and they can't really curl, they're just kind of pulling in on themselves.  As mentioned above, the squares are acrylic, which means I can't block them.  What I think I'll wind up doing when I finish is I'll kill the acrylic with my iron.  As nefarious as that sounds, it just means I'll place a towel over the blanket after smoothing it out, and iron it until the squares lie flat.  It means that the squares will never go back to how they were, but that's the goal - to get them to all lie flat and smooth.  I'll have to try to get a picture of it to post when I get the chance.

Another dear friend in Vegas will be sending me some yarn soon.  Alas, it's not actually for me, but for a project he wants me to make for him.  He has both a PS3 and an Xbox 360.  He loves his gaming, and his consoles and wants me to make pouches for his controllers to keep them safe as they are the special edition ones.  He loved the Transformers hat I made my husband a few years ago so much that he wants me to recreate the Autobot and Decepticon design on some drawstring pouches for the controllers.  I enjoy stranded color work a lot and was happy to agree to making them.  I'm a little iffy on gauge so I warned him that they may not be incredibly close fitting, but he was fine with that.  Despite my gauge handicap, my color work is pretty nice and even so I feel confident I can do a good job.  It's improved since I made my husband's hat.

I made his hat in October 2007.  As you can see, there are some spots in the color work where the stitches show through in the white.  For the most part I really don't have an issue with that anymore.  Admittedly though, despite working with double pointed needles for several years (which I'll need to do the upcoming projects), I still get ladders in my work.  A ladder is a loose spot between stitches between the needles.  I plan on combating this by changing my stitch count on my needles every few rows so there won't be a consistent line where the stitches are separated by the needles.

Anyway.  I used a size 3 circular and dk weight yarn for Paul's hat, so I'll be using size 1 dpns and fingering weight yarn for the controller pouches.  I wanted a finer gauge and I'm hoping that going down in size will give me a good sizing for the charts since I have to have a specific amount of stitches for the charts.

That's really about it in my little world at the moment.  I've been enjoying these stolen moments of knitting and silence, though I really can't wait until the hard work and stress are done and everybody's settled in after the move.  My mother in law has been living with us for two weeks already, but things are still up in the air with all the cleaning, organizing and packing.  I'm very much ready for some normalcy.