I May Have a Problem

So in the course of prepping for today's Sunday Funday, for which I am very excited (and will be revealing more about later), I compiled a few yarns in similar tones of my favorite color.  I had put a bag of leftover scraps together a while ago, and then ransacked my sock yarn stash for a few more.  And then my normal stash.  And then the back-up stash (don't ask).  And. . . well.

 

This may come back to haunt me at some point.

After doing some deep breathing, and a tiny bit of hand wringing, I stuffed most of it back into its respective cabinets and was left with the bag of remnants from the very beginning:

There are bits in there from two different dyelots of Kelp in Quince and Co's Tern, from my swatching and knitting of Alys.  There's a partial ball of Buoy in Tern, from another project I'm working on.  There are handspun scraps from a goof-off project I don't think I ever posted here (oops).  There's a couple bits of hand-dyed Brown Sheep Naturespun that I dyed for my Fair Isle Knitolution two years ago.  And there's a full skein of the most gorgeous handspun from my friend Jan, who I taught to spin and dye as an intern at the Fiber Gallery back in 2008.  I've got some pretty big plans for this stuff, which will involve the lovely piece of equipment in the background of the picture above!

The other thing I've been working on for the past few Sunday Fundays came about, spur of the moment, when we got a freak heat wave here in Maine.  I even had my window open! And you know what that means--suddenly, it's fleece washing season.  The problem I realized as I spun the excess water out of the washed fleece: this is the first time I've washed a fleece in my apartment.  This became painfully clear when I couldn't find a darn place to put it to dry!  I became very thankful that I had done dishes earlier that day.

 

 (the house was built in 1805, and has settled to a point where the cabinet doors don't shut there.  I hate this; my cat loves it.)

On the right is a fleece from Fleecewood Farm, and on the left is a CVM lamb fleece I bought at Rhinebeck back in 2008.  The first washed beautifully; the second I'm waving the white flag on and sending out to get commercially processed.  But last Sunday I got started on combing up the Fleecewood fleece!

 

I'm already dreaming about the Tour de Fleece when these are going to be my go-to.  And yes, I haven't forgotten about my Ursa--she's getting a dutiful few sleeve rows every Sunday.  But there are some other exciting things going on!