Even though you can't tell by the looks of my very-empty October blogs, I've been hard at work this month spinning and dyeing and carding. I've got 6 new batts and 5 new yarns in the store, and I'm getting a nice head start on Xmas gifts. I've spun some of my favorite yarns EVER this month.

Store items:

Oatmeal Cream Pie (perfectly named by my husband, because "it really looks like it!") is 5 ounces of the baby camel fiber that's been burning a hole in my fiber drawer since I got it last year, and I spun it with an ounce of the angora that I bought on my HONEYMOON. We're coming up on our 2nd anniversary, so this stuff really needed to be put to good use. It took forever to spin, because it was spun much thinner than I usually do, run through the wheel once more to give it way too much twist, then super-coil plied back onto a core thread. I worked on this thing over the course of Adam's weeklong business trip and still had to finish it up after he got back. The end result is awesome though, hopefully someone up north will give this guy a good home. The white bits are impossibly soft.

Stained Glass combines my one true love (rainbow color order) with a brand new technique that I have never tried before. The core yarn is a self stripe rainbow single. But instead of spinning another yarn to ply it with, I ran it through the wheel backwards and just held a clump of uncarded llama fiber touching the yarn. The llama would catch onto the yarn randomly, creating this interesting cocoon effect, like what your hair looks like when you accidentally walk through a cobweb. I secretly hope no one will buy this one so I'll be forced to keep it and knit with it.

Xmas gifts:

I would post pictures, but the people getting the gifts might see. Basically everyone is getting fingerless gloves from me. This is the first year since I learned to knit that I'm knitting gifts for people. The first year, everyone got a shawl and after that I got too obsessed with my own stuff to add gifts to my to-do list.

Speaking of shawls, I'm not sure if I've told that story on here or not. Anyway, here it is: In 2004 I bought a bunch of furry yarns, got my size 35 needles and made big shawls for my mom and step-mom. Adam saw me and asked "Seriously? You're giving everyone a rectangle for christmas?" No harm done though, everyone loved them. I think.