Yay! Presents!

My actual birthday is Wednesday, but I’m celebrating already! This came from Sue, for my LYS! And she’s not even a knitter! How about that for an awesome shopper? I’m going to save this as a post Yarn School reward! I don’t know what she’s implying with the tranny rooster, though.

Yesterday’s mail also brought this:

From Jennifer, so completely spoils me. We’re pretty fucking broke right now, what with the new car (the wait was supposed to be 3 months, so we thought we’d have more time to save up a down payment, but it only took 3 weeks, so we ended up having to scrape it together with zero notice), so it’s very exciting to get a wonderful treat. Not only did she remember how much I admired the yarn, but what COLOR I wanted, too! It wasn’t a birthday present per se, but I’m counting it as one.

And a Bay Laurel from Ron! I’ve heard these are hard to grow here (as is rosemary; both grew like weeds in Texas), so I don’t know whether to plant it in a pot or in the garden.  I always fail bringing pots in. I’ve read they’re troubled by scale indoors, and my citrus got killed by the scale inside last winter, after surviving scale the previous two (although I just read that humidity takes care of that; so maybe a humidifier would fix me up). But I really like bay in the garden. I just don’t know if I can pull it off. But I need to decide in the next couple days.

I’m trying not to knit or spin too much because I really want to heal up my arm injury (pulled muscle from 2 months ago that I keep re-hurting) before Yarn School. I made a sling and everything. I even wore it for a couple hours. But I did allow myself a little spinning last night:

I started on my second batch of Wildcat Hollow tri-color roving. This lot has a slightly thicker red-brown strip, which makes for a slightly darker yarn. I plan to ply the two together. I did the first spool with a woolen long-draw, but I’m nervous about my arm and can’t do the long draw on the left side, so I’m using a sort of modified woolen draw that’s how I spun before I learned worsted. I’m keeping it short and feeding continuously, but not smoothing the yarn, and letting the twist run up into the fiber and pulling the fiber back from it. Honestly, I don’t think woolen has to be a long draw, does it? I mean, isn’t it just how you let the fibers meet the twist?

I should do some spinning exercises. And by exercises, I mean lessons, not acrobatics.