Fiber Fluff: Stalled on the Shawl

 Hi everybody!

I have two shawls that I currently have set up for working on. They're both stalled because life has gotten in the way of spending time on serious knitting. One is the Lady in the Woods pattern which I am making in magenta with a black border. One is the pattern that I've winged together as I was going along. Both are not complicated patterns. They're straight up stockinette stitch (well, technically the Lady in the Woods is garter stitch but that is boring).

I haven't done any spinning in a while. I'm going to try to get to it again today. I'm half way through a ball of grey alpaca pencil roving. The cop on my drop spindle is half full. I think if I focus, I can finish it off over the next two weeks. The hard part is going to be spinning the third ply for this yarn. It is 2/3 alpaca and 1/3 acrylic. I have no idea what the staple length on the acrylic is. The ball of chunky yarn (which I'm going to unspin and have roving out of) claims it to be almost 300 feet long. If the staple length is 300 feet, I'm going to have to cut it up to make it easier to spin. According to my research, spinning acrylic is a lot like spinning silk. We'll see if I need one of my light weight spindles for this or not. I'd like to use the same spindle for all the plies and then spinning them together to make the final yarn. Everything is in the same colorway, so I don't need to chain ply to keep colors organized.

The crochet preemie hats project is on pause right now. I have about 80 preemie hats done. I just need to get myself organized to figure out how to get them to the rural hospital in my area. When the big project was done through the spinning guild I used to be a part of, the hats all went to the big city hospitals. I didn't think that was fair once I realized that. So, I have to do a little planning to get these hats to local rural hospitals so that they have something warm and comforting for the little ones there.

Book sales have slowed down, but my yarn stock pile is still pretty hefty. I am still drawing from the yarn that was donated by kind souls. Some of these hats look pretty funky but they work up super quick. I am branching out from hats for micropreemies into hats for babies a bit bigger to use up the yarn faster. I keep telling myself it's slower by the hour but faster by the week. I am debating if I should make thumbless mittens for the babies to match their hats. The last time I did that, it went over really well.