Fiber High

It's been a busy and exciting week. Since last Wednesday I've started this blog, joined an international scarf exchange, gone to a major fiber festival, joined Ravelry, attended a knitting group, and tonight I joined a spinning group. My mind is spinning, but boy am I high from excitement!

The spinning group was wonderful! I got my spinning wheel fine tuned and met several people, 2 of whom are going to be knitting-spinning buddies that do not live far from me. In addition, I now have another knitting group, will be knitting with friends on a weekday morning (learning how to spin with my Turkish spindle - one of my new knitting buddies knows how), and have yet another group that meets at a library on another weekday morning. So, 3 new face-to-face groups.

In addition to meeting new people, I was exposed to new wheels. I want a traveler and I'm leaning toward the Kromski Sonata. I love my traditional Ashford, but it's not portable.

I wound my blank yarn (Nature's Palette) but decided to forego the machine knitting for real knitting. B, the friend who introduced me to this group, decided she would knit the blanks with 2 strands of yarn from separate balls, so that when she dyed the yarn the 2 skeins would be more closely matched. Since we're knitting socks, matched yarn is a good idea. I plan to do this too. The idea of these blanks is to knit them in stockinette stitch, dye them in multiple colors making scribble-like patterns, set the dye, and then when the blank is ready, unravel the blank and knit a small project. The yarn ends up in unique patterns. I can't wait to see how it turns out. I think we're dyeing the blanks next month.