Happy New Year!

First, let me say that I'm feeling better.

I'm also feeling much more focused (not totally where I would like to be yet, but closer).

I'm throwing things away! No, trust me, this is a good thing. I've been slowly attacking the piles of stuff that has accumulated over the last four years that has no more business in my house. Stuff like empty boxes (not good boxes for shipping and such, just empty boxes from odd things like a coffee press). I have decluttered the coffee table (twice). I started decluttering a corner of my kitchen and found missing cookbooks, a cut crystal dish and, unfortunately, mouse poo under all the bits of paper and jars of expired vitamins.

But I'm not obsessing about the cleaning either. It's just one of the more noticeable aspects of my recover. Give me another week and I might tackle a closet!

I'm also spinning.

This is the second bobbin of a project for my mom... which I may end up keeping and redoing as I think I screwed this up.

Here was the plan. She asked me to spin sock yarn in a color other than brown (seems like the only yarn she saw me spin was brown, for some reason). She wanted it in superwash. So I ordered 8 ounces of plain white superwash from Paradise Fibers. I should have gone ahead and ordered a pound... but that's okay.

Anyway, I decided to do a Christmas/Yule theme and used green and red with a yellow highlight and dyed the roving with one end predominantly red and the other green with the yellow making the connection in between.

Once dried, I split the roving down the middle and broke it into manageable bits of about a yard long each. Each half and bit was numbered from end to end... so that the mostly red pieces at one end were number 1 with the two halves delineated as 1A and 1B. I then numbered each yard going down the two halves... end up with 1A through 5A and 1B through 5B. I spun 1A through 5A first starting with red and ending with green and got 4.2 ounces on one bobbin. Then I started on the B part in the same order.

When I ply them together, the colors should (in theory) pretty much line up.

Now, what I realized as I started into the second bobbin is that I made a small boo-boo when it came to planning for sock yarn. Doing color gradations works great for something like a scarf... but there should be two socks (and in this case four since there will be 8 ounces of fiber spun). So I actually needed to split the roving into four lengthwise sections and spin 2 ounces on one bobbin, then 2 ounces on the other, and then ply those together to make one skein. THEN do it again to make a second skein for the second sock.

The way I've done it, well, it will work if you want to make fun non-matching socks, but it won't work if you have this hangup about color coordinating like I do.

So I may just keep this yarn for myself, knit a holiday scarf for myself or as a gift for next year and start again. Mom's birthday isn't until the end of February. I think I'll have time....