I snapped a few photos of the carding machine and the wall of wool at Fibers 4 Ewe this past Saturday. This one is my favorite:

I am utterly fascinated with the process of commercial wool processing. The large-scale transformation of raw fleece to finished yarn seems inherently fantastical to me; it’s like a form of alchemy. Speaking of which, if you are similarly wool-obsessed and you haven’t seen the Shelter Mill Tour Jared Flood posted over on his blog over the last few days, run, don’t walk. Or, uh, click quickly. It’s breathtaking. Is there a Webby for yarn porn?

Honestly, this winter has been pretty brutal, and surprise surprise, adjusting to two babies this year has meant almost zero time for anything other than mothering. Hello, burnout! As it turns out, carving out a little space for yourself helps a whole lot, though. I hadn’t done anything out of the house alone on a regular basis since before Eve was born, and she’s two and a half now. And I guess I forgot for a while but it turns out I really love wool.

I am hoping this love of wool might eventually run in the family. This evening I was knitting while my daughter and I were snuggled down on the couch watching Blues Clues, and lo and behold, she asked me if she could have sticks and yarn like Mommy.

Is it weird that this may be one of my proudest moments as a parent? Sure, the first words and first steps were wondrous, but look! My baby girl wants to play with yarn and sticks! I am practically levitating with joy.

The Waiting for Baby blanket continues, albeit very slowly as the only time I ever get to knit anything is 2 hours a week on Tuesday mornings, when I go to my knitting group full of other people who want to hold the baby.

Everyone thinks it’s a hat.  It’s not a hat.

One very neat thing about this project is that it’s grown to the point that it can serve as its own knitting bag:

Now that, uh, five months have gone by, I’ve finally hauled my spinning wheel out of its coat-closet sabbatical and set it up next to my work computer. (When I’m not babywrangling or thinking about yarn, I work at home doing random webby things.)

I’ve actually been getting a lot of spinning done.  Curiously enough, it’s easy to pick up and spin for a minute or two between work tasks.  I am kicking myself for not realizing this sooner.

This spin is boring as all get out, but I feel like this is a very good exercise for me.   Spinning plain white roving lets you tune out the qualities of the fiber and just zone out on the actual spinning of it.

You’ll notice from the photo that at one point a couple of years ago I had a bout of paranoia in which  I labeled all of my bobbins on the “TOP” and “BOTTOM” because I thought if I put a half-spun bobbin on the wheel in the wrong direction it would mess up my yarn.  I have since realized this is not true, and feel sort of silly about it now.

This yarn I am spinning will be my first true three-ply.  I know, the last time I mentioned this yarn I was planning for it to be a two-ply.  But in the meantime, I found my fourth Majacraft bobbin!  w00t, as the kids say!

Anyhow, since I’ll be plying three singles together, I’m thinking it might be time to upgrade my ghetto handmade needles-poked-through-a-Corona-box setup to a real actual Lazy Kate when I eventually finish spinning the third bobbin of this stuff.  Considering I started spinning this yarn last summer, I’m hoping to buy it sometime before the end of the year.  

I know; I know.

The thing is, I’m totally going to need more yarn for baby knitting next week when I’m done my project!  I dusted off my spinning wheel and extricated the mind-numbingly fine yarn I’d been plying:

I also skeined up the tiny amount of finished yarn, so I could reclaim the bobbin. It was the barest handful of fiber, but I counted out 40 yards of it. Out of curiosity, I weighed it:

My postal scale says 10 grams. I am tempted to find out how many yards per pound that works out to, but I am too pregnant to deal with the math. A few calculations in the google search window work it out to 0.000551155655 pounds per yard, but I am far too pregnant-brained to deal with it from there. I know you have to divide something to solve for X, but I’m far too mentally exhausted to reliably navigate the morass of middle-school algebra.

Speaking of pregnancy brain, here’s a picture of me (and my husband) from a wedding we attended this past Saturday:

What I lack in mental acuity at this point I clearly make up for in roundness.

Anyhow, now that I’ve got three free bobbins I’m spinning up a wonderfully boring little two-ply merino worsted:

I would have preferred to spin a three-ply worsted (for increased durability as well as general aesthetic reasons) but since one of my four bobbins is occupied, a two ply will have to do. I know I could have chain-plied my singles yarn into a three-ply, but I really want to err on the side of evenness. (I generally consider myself to be a pretty good spinner, but I still have a hard time staying uniform over multiple bobbins.)

When I’ve got enough of it to knit a pair of longies, I’ll kettle dye it periwinkle and get to town on a little frankenpattern I’ve been cooking up in the back of my head–I want the Curly Purly Soaker waistband, Elizabeth Zimmerman’s butt and gusset (from the February chapter of Knitter’s Almanac), and a pair of plain straight stockinette legs that I can have fun embellishing. My only question is how long to make the legs–since the bun’s still in the oven, I have no concept of what sort of inseam she’ll require.

Of course, I will knit none of this until I’m done my work. I won’t even swatch! I now hereby abandon this blog until I’ve finished editing the first four chapters of Applied Linear Models with SAS. But I reserve the right to take spinning breaks. And, um, dye the yarn.