March Goes Out Like a Lion

This is the other skein I had spun for knitting.  The fiber is 50/50 wool silk.  I wasn't crazy about the colors but this was yet another gift from Melissa last summer.  It has a wonderful hand - it just looks weird.  I mean yellow and salmon - really?  I sampled two colors for weft.  I thought all along that I'd like the bassy yellow but it dominate the warp.  I sampled the "straw" that came in my recent order.

It really seemed to be the better fit so I tore everything out, including the hem stitching, and started over.

Here are both of the scarves from handspun knitting yarn. Weaving is a far better use for these than knitting. The most recent is the one on the left.

I spun up the last two of my blended batts and started with the crazy one first.  Once I got the yarn on and was ready to weave, I had no idea which of these two yarns would be a more fitting weft.

I was leaning towards the green but decided that this was the perfect time to sample.  I was started by how my beautiful handspun yarn just kind of faded away behind the green.  But when I stopped to think about it, I realized that green and red are opposites on the color wheel.  Blended together they make brown.

The yarn is mostly reds and the magenta is the winner.

This is the other of blended batts and I'm planning to weave it next, probably sometime next week  Again, I'm just not sure which color to use as weft.  This might be another case for sampling.  

And next behind that one will be another scarf from my shades of black.  I've already woven a scarf from this blend and passed it around for show-and-tell at the last guild meeting.  It was well received and they all said that it looks like granite.

Yes it does! Just a few days later a friend who is visiting the Anza Borrego State Park posted this picture on Facebook. 

I have a lot of skeins ready to weave as scarves so I decided to switch gears and try making knitting yarn.  I spun up 3.5 ounces of Ollie, one of our Shetland wethers.  He used to be brown and now his color comes and goes with the year.  Our shearer will be here in the next several weeks and we will have yet more fleeces.  My goal now is to see if I can find some way to employ our own fleece and use up some of the pounds and pounds that we have in the garage.  I talked to Laura about plying wool with bamboo and then dyeing it.  The bamboo won't take acid dye but she thought it would be really pretty.  

It's still gray and blustery here.  My neck rehabilitation has seemed to have hit an impasse, even with the yoga.  My daughter Chris arranged for me to have a 1 1/2 hour deep tissue massage last Sunday.  My son-n-law is a fencer with the Reno Silver Blades and Arik Shapiro is the their team masseuse.  The massage was successful and painful.  I told my neurosurgeon about it and he approved.

The plan now is to do an hour in the yoga studio and then pop over to Arik's for an hour of massage torture once a week until there's some improvement.  Yesterday was my first double-whammy.  That which does not kill us makes us stronger said Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a pretty smart guy and I'm about to find out if he was right.