I pluck it right from the tiny sheep in my living room. Where he got it was from FiberOptic on etsy. He’s a wise little sheep with very good taste.

My other fiber order got lost in the mail.

This is a 50/50 blend of bamboo and merino, handpainted in shades of brown, deep brown and black.

This is exactly how I like my coffee: Rich and full of wool.

I’m spinning it up as a lace weight because I feel the need to do some lace knitting coming on.

What have I done with the real me? Obviously, I am not me. I just can’t be.

Look at my poor dog. Georgia knows that I’ve been taken over by some alien life form that is controlling my central nervous system and it makes her sad.

She is overwhelmed by the responsibility of saving me (and the rest of humanity) from a sinister force that sends out parasitic drones to pull us down into the hive mind.

Or, she’s just enjoying the remaining bits of residual butt heat from my husband’s chair.

I can’t tell.

Black Coffee sock yarn is officially finished. So mood controlling alien parasites can’t be all that bad.

Right?

It’s not like my theoretical mind controlling alien parasite is making me listen to Phil Collins or Kenny G. Or making me read Altas Shrugged, or design handbags from human skin (you know, things that are *truly* evil.)

I’ve shocked it in hot water and cold, thwacked, soaked, and snapped the snot out of this yarn so that it’ll be as tough as the hubs of hell.

All the torture has felted and blossomed it just a little, forcing the merino to contract and lock together while the bamboo fibers loosen just slightly and giving it a slightly heathered appearance.

Pardon the extra sheen in this next picture, the yarn isn’t quite dry yet, and my photography skills still need improvement.

Because extruded bamboo fibers are clear (like polar bear fur) when the yarn is completely dry it should look like silk because of the way light reflects through the individual strands (think less like fiber optic cable and more like seeing a crayon through a quartz crystal), but keep most of the insular qualities of merino wool. The drape will be a compromise of the two fibers in the blend.

I probably spend way too much time looking at yarn through my kids’ microscope huh?

I’m saving up for one of those microscopes that I can hookup to the USB on my computer because I’m way too lazy to do sketches and scan them. In case you’re wondering, extruded bamboo fibers look a lot like nylon while bast bamboo fibers are much more interesting (and far less yummy and spinnable) under a microscope because there is a recognizable cellular structure, and when backlit on the slide bleached bamboo bast fibers make pretty rainbows.

Since impulse buying is (part of) what lead to my cluttered life in the first place, that means that staying with Flylady would present way too much resistance. I’m a path of least resistance kinda girl.

I’m not squishy or gooey and don’t fall into purple puddles but the change to my inbox does make me a little sad.

Fortunately I have some gorgeous handpainted bamboo/merino blend roving to console me.

The picture I took came out okay, except the colors are much more vivid in real life.

The yarn when plied is destined to become a Baby Surprise Jacket for Lexi. I know she’s no longer a baby, but it doesn’t take much tweeking to embiggen the pattern to fit a 5 year old.