Holidays

I'm almost at the start of a three-week holiday from work; just one solitary night shift to do tomorrow night, and then a long stretch of knitting hours ahead! I did plan my holidays so they would overlap with the school holidays a bit, so next week won't be all knitting hours, but the two weeks after that should be very quiet, and hopefully productive.

This last few weeks saw the end of the boring brown ribbed socks. Thankfully, he likes wearing them and says they fit well, so maybe I'll make him another pair some day.

This meant the first 50% of my NEWT was finished, at least, what I had said I would do for 50%. The 50% mark had been "accepted", initially; when I happened to mention that I probably underestimated it, though, they suddenly they changed their minds (2 weeks before the deadline!) and I had to change my 50% goal. Luckily, I had been working on other things already, so I suggested what I'd pretty much already completed, and the new 50% mark was accepted, and now I just have to retake photos and things :S

Also finished this nice long scarf, made of sock yarn and handspun. The sock yarn was carefully warped so that the colors lined up, but in the end the handspun weft, being thicker, made it hard to notice, except on the fringe. I like to think that the colors are a bit cleaner, as there are only two colors in any one weft-row. Anyway, it's long and soft and bright. And well over 3m long :)

And now, I'm working on another spin (the Inca Gold color), another weaving project (greens and blues) and my handspun top, which I'm about 250g into. :)

Polwarth

I didn't find much fleece to buy at Bendigo this year, but I did get about 400g of Polwarth and 600g of Corriedale to play with. For my NEWT I'm doing 5 projects (for different places or people) and this is the one for Spinners End.

Raw, washed, carded, spun

Spinners End is the dull, grey, run-down old street where Severus Snape grew up. He had a pretty grey sort of life there, too, until one Lily Evans brightened things up. For the project I'm washing and carding all the fleece, and the Polwarth will be spun, dyed and knit into something a bit warmer than a cold old street.

Carded wool, twisted into 40g rolls

So far I've washed and carded all the Polwarth, and the 400g of raw fleece ended up as 300g of batts. Then I spun up 75g into a fingering weight 3ply. I'm going to spin three skeins of about 70-80g, so I can dye them into three colors for the "3-color cashmere cowl"

Trying to spin thinly

Lovely soft stuff, this! It's got a decent yardage that would be 400y/100g (if I'd spun more).

I've also knit about 200g of my "Hogwarts" vest (which is Rosa's sleeveless cardi) and spun up a class. Tonight and tomorrow I'm going to try and finish a scarf for another class... and then I'd better get onto finishing Nathan's socks, which are the only thing left to do for my 50%  points.

Slytherin have come last again this last term. Bit sick of being last! But I did get a personal best with my points, which was, if I added right, 1634. Don't think I'll be trying to beat that for a while! Only 4 people (out of about 170 Slytherins) got more than 1000, which is a bit sad, really; hopefully we'll do better this term. I mean, my decent score didn't make much of a dent, but if everyone had gotten 80 or 90 points extra, it would have been enough to win. It's a team thing.