A dose of fiber for the day....
 
This post would be much better with photos, but we'll have to wait until a couple of somebody's are in bed for that.  But I'll tell you...I suppose the exchange is a thousand words for each picture, right?  Sit back... ;)
 
Okay, so I started Haiku with the fervor of a zealot.  I let Rhys chase the kids, I knit in the car, at the playground, while chatting with friends, etc.  I am using the heather/tweedy purple merino top that started out as a sample pack item from Webs, and then I trotted out to get more of it as soon as I spun it up.  It's yummy.  My initial idea was socks, but it was too soft and satiny for feet (I know, true socknitters will be offended, but there you have it).  But this seemed great.  I have about 5 oz., knitting up at 4 sts/in in stockinette, 4.5 in garter.  That amount got me almost exactly halfway through the body.  So I got another 8 oz. of the purple, and got Henry to choose between a greenish and a blue heathered top for his sweater and got him about 14 oz. of that.  He chose the blue without a second thought, by the way--my guy knows his mind! 
 
So now I'm back to spinning the stuff and I really have my work cut out for me.  I'm a little worried about matching the gauge the second time around.  I am not worried about perfection--there's plenty of thick and thin in that yarn anyway, but it would be bad if it was consistent within itself, but at a larger or smaller gauge, you know?  I posted a thread about whether it is better to spin-spin-spin-knit-knit-knit or spin-knit-spin-knit-spin-knit on spindlers, and it looks like I'm going to see if I can do the latter successfully right now.  And forget that other project (Zeus)--I haven't touched that in a week with all this other stuff I have going on.  I'll be lucky if Zeus gets done before 2005 the way I'm distracting myself these days.
 
The only good thing about running out of the purple merino is it forced me to get back to Shapley.  I put in some good work on that project in the car going back and forth from Rhys' mom's house this Sunday and Monday.  I'm almost finished with the increases on the back.  I have to be sure to remember *not* to put the short rows on the back, though the idea makes me think of some kind of Hindu goddess of breastfeeding multiples, you know, with boobs on both the back and the front.  That would definitely  come in handy for the days when they keep trying to kill each other while nursing!
 
I finished the silk cap I started on my last class, and I put it on the niddy noddy last night.  My niddy noddy, oddly, seems to measure out to 62 inches or so, which is 10 inches shy of 2 yards, which is just weird.  Anyway, I tried to count it but lost track at 100 wraps when Rhys asked me a question. (Note: I didn't kill her.  I deserve credit for this.)  I think I was less than halfway through, so that's a lot of (very thin) silk.  I had an idea that I'd ply it with alpaca and then paint the two together for MIL, but I'm not sure I can spin the alpaca that small and I don't think it would work well as a wrap.
 
Maybe I'll give it a try, but I'm LOVING knitting with the handspun merino top, and it's hard to tear myself away from spinning more of it.  Forget about my mom's soy silk.  Honestly, spinning silk is so much easier, I'm a little spoiled for the nice vegan stuff.  Ah well, I'll get back to it eventually, I'm sure.