I heart The Wicked Stitch

I just love teaching there! Yesterday was Thrummed Bunny Slippers and Spinning Self-Striping Yarns. We each took one colorway and spun it into several different stripes. Once I wash the little sample skeins, I’ll line them all up and shoot them. Then I get to design a little cowl for them, yay!

Writing a pattern for the striped yarns tops my list of Fun Projects I Get To Do as Soon as I Finish My Gorram Work. Stupid work.

Here’s the full list:

Finish & wash self-striping samples!
Write self-striping handspun cowl (might be fun to write this all up & sell fiber kits…)
Make beer! (This is assuming my ploy to get my mom to gift me a beer kit worked, not at all a sure bet. What about a Thanksgiving present? Is that a thing?)
Make cider! (This would be in lieu of the beer kit not materializing, or afterwards)
Fix up the greenhouse! (See photos below.) This falls dangerously close to the work category, except that it doesn’t generate any money, so its priority is dropped even though it’s important to me & time sensitive because we’ve got some extra-low lows on the horizon and I don’t think the fruit will tolerate that kind of a drop in temperature.
Line Ron’s mittens!
Start my own Flocked mittens!
Finish my socks! (See below)
Empty the freezer!
Stock the freezer! (Soup, beans, stock, stews, chili, etc.)
Knit up Last-Minute Gifts class samples! Okay, technically work, but lower urgency and more fun than THE BIG WORK I AM IGNORING RIGHT NOW
Build a fire pit with Ron!
Make Christmas presents! This year is going to be almost fully handmade.
Make that Glen sweater!
Make exciting datebook covers! Wait, that’s work, too.
Write up proposal. Hm. Also work. Work is hijacking my fun list.
Properly bottle the ginger beer! I’m kind of stoked it turned out boozy (if that’s actually the case), but the current mason jar setup doesn’t seem very stable. Also, that’s the third alcohol-production-related item on my Fun List.  What’s that mean?
Experiment more with bread making!

Mostly dead plants, but nice slow-ripening tomatoes

If I can keep them from freezing and avoid mice, I think they’ll keep ripening through December. But to survive the upcoming hard freezes this week, I’ll need to fix this:

Makeshift Greenhouse

Having bed sheets loosely tucked around the front won’t cut the mustard when it’s 15° (-9C).

Working on some quick toe-up socks. They’re my Cautionary Tale socks because they showcase the dangers of letting your singles for Navajo ply get away from you. My yarn was only a teeny bit thicker at the beginning of the bobbin, but once it was Navajo plied and worked into socks, the difference was huge.

I’m knitting them two at once, toe up, so the difference between the gauge makes for one dense 38-stitch sock and one lighter 44-stitch sock. I also have to work a couple extra rounds on the light sock every inch or so.

Navajo plying cautionary tale

Navajo plying cautionary tale

Spun from this (the true color is somewhere between those pictures and this one):

Rhinebeck Fiber: Triple R Farm wool roving

I split the roving and spun stripes because it was pure mud combined (although I understand intellectually that red + green = mud, it still took spinning it to accept it).

Whoops. Boozy?

This was my Alden Amos ginger beer experiment. Since I don’t really understand the purpose/proper use of my hydrometer (it came with my as-yet unusued cider-making kit), so taking a reading of it didn’t really help me at all. Bottom line: my ginger beer tastes alcoholic, but I don’t know whether it actually is. I think I’ll just drink a jar of it and see if I’m drunk afterwards. The things I do in the name of science!

Champagne-y Ginger beer

Either way, I think I’ll mix up some simple syrup on the side and plan to combine them at serving rather than experimenting further with adding sugar, a crap shoot.

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