Sunday, March 11, 2012

Sunday Funday: Of Matching Missteps and Magical Merino

Today's Sunday Funday is apparently brought to you by the letter "M".

I've been bouncing back and forth between projects all day today--the time shift has me all discombobulated, and I've been hopping around, running errands, doing chores, and cooking on a whim all afternoon. (By the way, pizza with sun-dried tomato feta, caramelized onions, peppers, and bacon? Well worth the fact that I ate dinner at 9:00 this evening.) Today's crafty projects have been the same: I've knit a few rows on a work project, spun a little bit, prepped some other fiber for spinning for a sweater, knit, then un-knit, then re-knit, then un-knit a few rows of the sleeves on my Ursa sweater. I can't seem to settle, and I'm starting to guess at the reasons.


(The offending sleeves think about the consequences of their actions.)

The big one is that for Lent this year, inspired by Leah's yearly escapades, I gave up video. I don't own a TV, so everything I watch is computer-based, and that can often lead me down a path of watching random crap just because it's there. So until Easter, there's no Netflix, no Youtube, no Hulu, no DVDs. My one out is that I can go see a movie, but I've been content so far with listening to audiobooks and reading on my Kindle while knitting. I hit a snag today, though--both projects I'm knitting at the moment are a wee bit too complex to work on while reading (hence the Matching Missteps of the title: it took me seriously an hour to sort out my sleeves and get them back to the same length), but the book I'm reading is an old favorite and I can't bear to put it down! So I waffled, putting this project down and picking that one up, finishing up some loose ends and contemplating new ones.

One of the nice things is I actually finished a tiny spinning project (the Magical Merino) while the onions and peppers were caramelizing and while I was trying to keep myself away from the last little bit of banana date bread in the kitchen. This was leftover from a PortFiber batt I had bought to try corespinning, and I had started spindle spinning it a few months ago on a whim. The funny thing happened when I started wandering back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen as I wound the yarn for Andean plying; unless I was hallucinating, I had some very different yarn on my hands depending on what room I was in. You know those times you try to photograph something, and the color in the photo is completely different depending on the lighting? Typically that color change will show up in the photo, but not necessarily in person. This yarn, however, was plain as day different from room to room.

Here's the dining room:


And the kitchen:


Wild, right? I have no idea how this happened! The best part was Andean plying on the threshold between the two rooms; the yarn on the palm of my hand was lit by the dining room and was pure olive green, while the yarn on the back of my hand was lit by the kitchen, and was pure orange!

So even if I didn't make huge progress on any one project today, I at least amused the neighbors by running back and forth between my kitchen and my dining room, staring at yarn. As you do.

(The other thing giving me ants in my pants? Spring's on its way. I can feel it!)