A good week for mail!

My mailbox was my bestest friend this week! First, a present from Laura D: lovely autumnal hand-dyed masham (predrafted here; I can’t resist drafting slippery masham) and a sweet vintage apron!

From Felicia, a pound of moorit merino roving (swap):

Swap with Melissa of Moustache Rides Yarn:

There was also a tiny bag of felt nubbles which has gone missing. I suspect Freddy. I love the Freddy, but he’s a gorram fiber thief. (Okay, it turns out Freddy wasn’t the culprit–I found them in my desk drawer, where I had hidden them from Freddy. But in fairness, I could barely take a picture before he absconded with one of them.)

And I also got some books I ordered, including this one, which represents my newest obsession:

It’s too late to build one for this winter, but I really want to build one in the next year or two as a dual purpose winter gardening/supplemental heat collector. I’m thinking the roof over the science room that leads to the upstairs hall, or maybe on the ground level in the courtyard, leading into the science room windows. Ideally, we’d be able to scrounge salvage windows all year, then build a (recycled, hopefully) timber frame and set it in with all the windows.

In the meantime, I’m going to content myself with building some heat grabbers as a little passive solar test this winter.

My current WIP sweater (I’m behind a month, so this will be my September sweater) is a tweedy purple short-sleeved cropped cardigan requested by my mom. It’s made of seed stitch stripes of purple Malabrigo merino, overdyed handspun local kid mohair single from Laura’s Pygoras, and some leftover Andean Silk from the last purple sweater I made mom. I think I’ll probably trim all the edging with the Malabrigo as I did on the sleeve. I feel weird making a short sleeved sweater when I’m kind of freezing my tits off (though they’ve scheduled several days of sunshine, so hopefully the building can rebuild a little thermal mass this week). But Mama’s in Texas, so short sleeves it is.

My October sweater will be a long-overdue Cobblestone for Ron out of donegal tweed, and then I think I’m going to frog & restart a matching sweater dress I started for myself over the summer. I definitely want some wool dresses this winter. I get sick of wearing jeans all winter, but I don’t have any warm dresses.

3 Replies to “A good week for mail!”

  1. I love the way the textures / colors work together in the sweater — I’ve knitted with that purple malabrigo and its just about my favorite. I hear you on the the warm woolen dresses (I’m also about to have a baby and am just dying to be done with maternity clothes. I don’t think any of my jeans are going to fit any time, soon, tho and a knitted dress sounds like a perfect alternative…). also, I just finished a woodland lace shawl with your pattern and I love love love it. thank you so very much for sharing the pattern — it was my first time with lace and it was pretty much the perfect project for me. thank you!

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