To kill or not to kill...

This morning I was going to make a joyful post. Yesterday I finished plying the last of some sock yarn that I've been spinning as a birthday present for a very dear friend of mine. I spent the afternoon dying it and it's finally done now. I told her what I wanted to make for her, since she is now knitting, and asked her what colors she was into right now. She told me purples and oranges. So this is what I came up with.




It's nearly 500 yards of 3-ply handspun sock yarn, 75% superwash wool/25% nylon, hand-dyed in purple and orange with a little bit of magenta in there, too.

Then this morning, after I had just finished setting it out and taking a few pictures of it, while importing them to the computer to write this blog, my husband's hound, made what might be her very last mistake with me. She stole my yarn from the table and mangled it.

It is so tangled. I am furious. I am so thankful that I put so many ties in these to help keep them from becoming tangled, and I likewise thankful that it appears to not have been torn or shredded at all. Still it may take hours to fix this mess.



For now I have locked the offending member of the household in her kennel (far safer for her right now than being in my presence where she, no doubt, would encounter destruction).

It's such a bummer. It was all done and now it needs more work. I was going to spend this morning doing the heel of the second Baudelaire, and now, depending on how bad this is, this may be what I end up doing instead.

I'm really trying to love that dog, but she's working so hard to become my nemesis.

Liar, Liar...

... pants on fire.

When I said I was going to pack up my wheel for a bit and take a break, I really did have good intentions. In my defense, it did stay packed up for a few days. Perhaps part of the burnout I was feeling with the wheel was because of my selling (or rather not selling) yarn on Etsy. I don't want to run a business selling handspun yarns, but I would like to be able to sell off some of them here and there to make enough to support my fiber habit, rather than putting extra strain on my family's income.

So, last weekend I was contemplating just going through the next few months until the listings on my yarns expired and then just kind of forgetting about it, when I came home last Saturday night to find that my Indian Valley sock yarn had sold. I was overly-excited about it to say the least. It was my first sale, and it felt very nice.

Charged with new enthusiasm, the wheel quickly came out again to produce more sock yarn and I have celebrated this week with knitting a sock from some of my own hanspun. The spinning job on this yarn was great, but I didn't like the way the colors worked together, so I kept it. It's still pretty.



I knitted this one from the toe up, to make sure I wouldn't run out of yardage. This sock yarn makes an extremely cozy, winter appropriate sock. Though now I'm affected by a combined version of second sock syndrome: not only do I have to knit the second sock, but I still have to spin the yarn for it as well. I'm confident it will be well worth it once it's done.

So, as far as the spinning goes, I have spun half of the yarn I need for my next listing and I ought to have the other half of it done by the end of the week. I haven't made my mind up about what to name this colorway, but I figure it ought to be something nautical (while thinking of nautical names I had a good laugh about the coincidental resemblance of this yarn to the team colors of the Seattle Mariners- it could make nice socks for a baseball fan).



So I'm hoping to have this one listed very soon on Etsy and soon to follow that will be a beautiful fiery-colored sock yarn.

This next week or two I'm also going to be spending some time working on more unfinished objects, and have even more knitting stacked on my plate once I've finished what's already in progress. I'm hoping to finish a sweater I'm working on for Paige as well as finishing the ugly christmas sweater once and for all. It's amazing how easily I get distracted.

In need of refreshing...

I feel I've finally reached a place where I need to step back from things and take a break, or I'm going to burn-out big time. I've been spinning and spinning and knitting and knitting and I just really need to stop for a while.

I'm beginning to think that God is sending me a message. I've become so fiber-obsessed that I'm not doing anything else or going anywhere else that isn't already a part of my daily routine. Two months have passed since the beginning of this year, when I first started writing this blog, and virtually nothing in my life that I want to change has changed.

I started to hit some hard emotions on Sunday, when we went to 'try out' a different church. The people were nice and the sermon was really good, but I felt like crying the entire service, which at the time I attributed to my being right smack in the middle of my monthly. My sweetheart of a husband is a wonderful man, and though he's not all that vocal about it, I think he loves God- he's the kind of guy that doesn't really strike you as a Christian, but then he pulls off some incredibly selfless act of loving-kindness and gives of himself 110%.

However he gets uncomfortable at our usual church because the people there are extremely friendly and they like to come up and talk to him and invite him to home-groups during the week and such- which he's made it quite clear he doesn't want to do. So, a few weeks back when I had to work a Sunday morning for his sister, he ended up going to church with his mom, and afterwards, told me he really liked it and thought it would be good if I came and gave it a try. So, this Sunday we all went, and like I said, the sermon was good and the people were friendly, but I just really wanted to cry the whole time.

Then yesterday, after dropping Paige off at preschool, I was driving down the road and felt like God was showing me that the reason I want to stay at the Vineyard (our usual church) is because all the people there are really on fire for God. They're passionately in love with him. Which is the kind of Christian I want to be. I felt like God was telling me that the problem I've been having, the wrong feeling I've been having about my life, is because even though I love God, I'm not in love with him, I'm not passionately on fire for God, and it's throwing my entire life out of balance. Right now, even though I love my friends and my family and I'm thankful for all of the blessings in my life, I'm not really enjoying any of it because I'm not spending enough time with God. I've let my relationship with him be pushed to the backburner, by things which are totally unimportant, and I'm not loving anything or anyone the way I ought to right now because I'm not connected to the very source of love- God Himself.



So this morning I felt like God was impressing on me, that what I really need to do, is to fast for a while, and spend the majority of my free-time in His word, while I regain my focus and the balance in my life.

I know it's good for me to have a hobby, and I know that God wants me to have things that I enjoy doing in my life. He's the one who put that love and creative energy in me in the first place. I'm sure it wont be that long till I'm spinning again, but I until I get some balance back and my peace about it has been restored, I'm going to pack up my wheel and take a break. I've a few socks on the needles, that I'm sure I'll finish over the next week or two, but the rest can of it can wait... for me... for a change.