The Black Coffee roving from FiberOptic is almost sock yarn now.

Please excuse the greenish hue, my camera does that under fluorescent lights. The greenish hue doesn’t exist in real life and I’m sure it could be corrected in Photoshop except that my attempts at correcting it turned out far worse than the original.

Note to self: If I *must* own expensive software, I might want to learn how to use it before it is obsolete.

At least I managed to get an accurate picture of the finished Dragon Tile.

I was worried that the red wouldn’t stand out against the gray background but it seems to stand out just enough.

Good lighting didn’t hurt either.

I’m itching to do some botanical dissections in thread. I’m thinking pillow covers.

The above paragraph probably explains why my husband rarely buys me flowers or houseplants doesn’t it?

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.

I haven’t put forth any serious spinning effort in a while, every once in a while I grab my spindle and work on the reddish brown baby alpaca but the wheel has languished in the closet since August.

Opal knows what it takes to get a girl spinning again and put it all in one care package for me. Caramels, warm hats, comfy socks, and of course yummy roving. Thank you Opal!

Not pictured is the HK notepad, the coolest cabled hat ever (I’m not taking it off) or the caramels (because I’ve eaten them and they were yummy) or the gorgeous bracelet (note to self, buy more batteries for camera.)

Aren’t the amigurumi the cutest ever? Lexi loves them so much (according to Lexi they know all the funniest lines from Finding Nemo, it’s rare to find such movie loving crocheted sea dwellers.)

The roving is called Evil Clown, but spun up I think it is more “kind hearted Gypsy princess” than white faced carnie gone bad.

On other fronts I was called an “elitist b*tch” because I commented on how many knitters and spinners had cool blogs. That’s almost as good as last week when I was called a passive agressive control freak, not sure what that was for, or what the writer hoped to accomplish so I’ll go on assuming that the writer of that message had a psychotic break of some sort. This is the best I can do since I’ve given up on the cussing words.

I was offline just after the inauguration (power outage) but I did watch the inauguration ceremony and President Obama’s speech online prior to the outage and I made some notes when it was was clear I wouldn’t be able to comment until the lights came back on.

First and foremost is that I have a dim recollection of the National Lampoon’s “The lost white house tapes” and I half expected, half hoped that there would be a swearing out ceremony for George W. (perhaps Jesse Jackson could have delivered it.) I was rather disappointed that there was no swearing out ceremony.

Second was that the hot phrase on Fox News, was “a peaceful transition of power”– their correspondents must have said “a peaceful transition of power” at least 20 times in the ten minutes that we actually watched the live feed online. So much so that I figured that Fox had gone with the “If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all” bit of wisdom.

MSNBC was much better, and still it was a little creepy coverage-wise. There were many comparisons between Obama and Lincoln and Obama and Kennedy. As nice as those comparisons were, I figure it’s not good luck to compare a newly elected president to two presidents who, when all is said and done, are most famous for being assassinated. Don’t jinxy Obama!

(Yes, I am just superstitious enough.)