Carpe Diem

Just in case you forgot, I live in the Pacific Northwest and our idea of Fall is cloudy with rain and Winter is cloudier, rainier and cooler.  We are now experiencing the Fall to Winter transition meaning there are long stretches of little to no sun for days.  We have just experienced several days of lack of sun; but today, today it is bright and sunny.  I must seize this opportunity.

Such a lovely view from my office.  I know, I am very lucky 

First I took a longer than average walk this morning because it was so delightfully bright and the air was an appropriate degree of crisp.  I will also get out of the house to do fun things like wash my car and get a flu shot.   (Pam, Tena that reference is for you two!  For the rest of you, trust me it is a funny inside joke.)

I have been using the cloudy days to seize the opportunity to spin as much as possible for my days of using the spinning wheel are numbered.  (Say if any of you reading this know of an upright, double drive (double tredal) portable, not necessarily one that collapses, spinning wheel on sale for a reasonable price, I am in the market.  It can be U.S. or Canadian in location.)  I spun up some very lanolin laden, long stapled roving.  I thought it might be easier to spin because of all that sticky lanolin.  Alas I was wrong, it was harder to control.  My consistency was off a bit, but it was good enough to be used single ply (this means it won´t be falling apart because my spinning has improved that much).   My handspun was knit with some variegated yarn to create these cute little booties.

Ok, it is not quite a pair yet.  BTW, manipulating the variegated yarn means cutting it and adding the new colour.  That causes the mess of string you see on the unfinished bootie.  The first one looked equally as rough before I finished it.

The colour scheme was driven by the natural colour of my homespun and the rather dark burnt orange colour of the buttons I wanted to use.  The variegated yarn was manipulated because the colourways were too long.  The dark brown had to run into the olive green, then into the orange and tan (which matched my handspun) to give the whole thing an earth tone effect.   I seized what I had in the house and managed to come up with a combination of colours I rather like.  Tomorrow in our class we will be talking about colour and how to combine it successfully.  I hope to improve my skills in that realm.

Now I am off to carpe the heck out of the rest of this lovely diem.  It is just too nice to remain inside.