Handspun: Lithophyte and Blue Smorgling (as well as various goings on)

I'm living in the Temple of Disease and Pestilence. A couple weeks ago, Littlest Bug had chicken pox, closely followed by stomach flu (let me tell you, you can never quite unsee the moment when something so little manages to barf up the Pacific Ocean...). Everything seemed fine... until the early hours of Friday morning, when all hell broke loose. Stomach flu snuck up on me, and made its surprise appearance very well known by 3am. Bigger Bug now has chicken pox. And Littlest Bug is battling another round of bronchitis. Basically, a terrible weekend had by all.




So, what do you do when you're splitting your time between your bed and the bathroom? Why, you spin, of course! I grabbed my blue Secret Smorgling box from Nunoco and got spinning. I decided on a thick single, mostly because I was too tired and poorly to focus on a thin and even yarn, but also because I've been spinning thin lately and I needed some instant gratification to make me feel better.






I ended up with 154m from 150g of fibre - a mixture of merino, bamboo, tussah silk, mulberry silk, flax, milk fibre, firestar, silk noil and angelina - spun into a low-twist super bulky single. The thought of having to full the yarn gave me the heebie-jeebies, but I decided to suck it up and go for it. Two dunks each in hot and cold, with a little bit of squeezing, was enough to make the yarn quite sticky - I was deathly afraid to turning it into woolly dreadlocks so I decided to err on the side of not-enough than too-much. Now it's dry, it seems fine to me! It's just so squishy and poofy and snuggly and I can't stop squeezing it...

Earlier in the week, I also spun up Lithophyte - a mixture of Pansies (Falkland), Stonecrop (Merino, Tussah silk, silk noil), and Purple Topshells (Romney) - so what better name than flowers and plants that grow on rocks and cliffs? A nice spring seaside theme, I suppose. This is my first true three-ply, I'd only chain-plied before, so it was a nice change. The colours are predominantly grey, yellow and purple, with little flashes of chartreuse and powder blue coming through. I really like this yarn. 300g of fibre gave me 210m of aran weight yarn, with enough left over to make 13m of Pansies (worsted, chain-plied) and 24m of Stonecrop (worsted, chain-plied).







The Feburary Odyssey Trail update happened on Friday night - I managed to tear myself away from the safety of the bathroom for just enough time to grab a gorgeous braid of Wensleydale and Tussah silk fibre. The updates are ruthless, you really have to get in there quick because the stock goes damn fast. Sometimes, you click on "checkout" only to realise that what you wanted has now become out of stock just because you decided to ponder over another yarn or fibre for an extra eighteen seconds. So! I'm super excited that I got my first choice fibre. Basically, my face whenever I think about it:

The February Happy Mail from A Beautiful Mess arrived earlier in the week - two of my favourite pieces from this month's lovely box are the coffee card (because who can resist puns?), and the word stickers (because everyone loves Mean Girls references - so fetch).