Happy New Year!

I've been away from 99% of my fiber and had gone into withdrawal, but I'm back. Mr. Daisy and I roadtripped with his (Mr. Daisy's) parents to Denver to visit our newish nephew (8 months old), as well as his (nephew's) parents. We drove through two days of blizzard/white-out conditions in Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska to get there.

He's very tactile - likes different textures, and really likes grabbing straps and cords, so I thought perhaps spinning would be a good fit for him. I tried to teach him about spinning, but he seemed more interested in the spindle as something to chew on than to spin.



He likes to eat (or at least chew) lots of things - none of which are food.



Apparently electrical cords are also a favorite chew toy, but his parents have kept those out of his reach, so no pictures.

Now I'm back and in spinning mode. I spun for a few hours yesterday and today at home, then went to a spinning group for 5 hours today, will spin another 4 on Sunday with a different group. No pictures of new yarn yet, but I do have new fiber.

Before I left, I had a dyeing day where I dyed 3 batches of fiber. One was an attempt to get a combination of orange, yellow, and green. I did this on wool fleece as well as on silk, with no set plans about how I would combine the two. I now have some plans, but I want to see how the wool looks carded up. The silk looks exactly how I wanted it to look, which is pretty exciting.



The wool is close, but I wish I'd gotten more plain yellow.




Continuing with the three-color attempts but wanting something more monotonal, I did two batches of two greens and a blue. The first picture is what I originally dyed; since I generally put in too much dye, I threw in some fleece afterwards to soak up the rest of the dye. The fleece turned out to be more of a blended color, rather than the distinct colors you see in the first batch.





And then, when I was in Denver, I supported the local economy as well as independent businesses by patronizing a great multi-craft shop, the Fancy Tiger. I bought lots of fiber and at good prices - alpaca, BFL, "faux cashmere," silk, and a few other small things, all for me, and a little bit of fiber for other people. All for the good of the economy, of course. No selfish motives at all. Most of it is not yet colorful. I plan to keep some of it natural color (the alpaca is silver, the BFL is light to medium brown), if I can keep it from leaping into the dyepot on its own. (Tricky stuff, fiber.) There's some colorful sari silk, though.



Fancy Tiger has supplies for all sorts of fiber arts: spinning, felting, knitting, crocheting, sewing, and needlework. Highly recommended. They also have a clothing store, which I didn't get a chance to go to.

And once I get a little more yarn spun, I'll get some nice pictures of that as well.