Ahem. I seem to have cast on for Juno.

What happened was, I remembered about this cotton yarn in my stash that I bought in Baltimore, and then lost the label for. I cast on a clapotis with it not long after I bought it, but it wasn't really working out (that's the pre-frogging clapotis in the photo to the right). I'd gone down a needle size, because the yarn is lace weight, so it was only wide enough to be a scarf, not a wrap. Trouble is, I wear scarves for warmth rather than for decoration, and a cotton lace weight scarf just isn't warm enough. I abandoned it partway through, and left it sitting in the stash for years, and today I remembered it.

I dug it out, and started to wonder what the yarn was. A bit of Googling and Ravelling, and I'd found it out: it's Blue Heron yarns' egyptian mercerised cotton, probably in the 'Deepwater' colourway. It's soft and lovely, but I've never knit anything else with cotton, and I've never been completely sure what to do with it. However, with the wonders of Ravelry and my new-found knowledge of its identity, I wandered around looking at what other people have done with it, and after some more searching, I arrived at Juno.

I looked again at the clapotis, and decided it was irredeemable. I frogged it, wound the yarn into a skein and then a ball, and cast on.

I'm not completely sure this will be It for this yarn, either. (It was briefly a ruffled tank top from Alterknits before it was a clapotis.) But I like the pattern, and it's a departure from my usual knitting, and it's interesting at the ends, but straightforward in the middle, so I can do other things at the same time as knit it once I'm on the straight section. And the cotton doesn't seem to mind being frogged and reknitted at all, so it's no great hardship if this also turns out to be a doomed experiment ;-)

This looks much less peacocky now it's finished than it did in progress, but the name remains anyway. The weird thing about it is that it often manages to look like blue-shading-to-purple, when it's actually blue and green, and neither shade of blue admitted to having any association with purple when still in fibre form.

It's soft and smooshy three ply merino, really quite evenly spun and plied (both on the wheel), and about DK/worsted sort of weight. I've no idea at all what to do with it but I love it anyway. Maybe I'll just keep it as a pet, and get it out and touch it every now and again ;-)

The second picture is 'two thirds peacock' - a tiny amount of two ply from the light blue and the green left over from the three ply. The last picture is 'ever diminishing peacock' - a very tiny indeed skein of green two ply. Both of these are too small to do anything much with. They might go into the scrap scarf, or I might eventually come up with something that requires tiny bits of yarn. Some sort of freeform patchwork 'art' type thing, perhaps.

Oh, and this (right) is a better FO picture of the purple three-ply - it's much more like the actual colours than the one I posted the other day. I started making flip-top mittens out of the other skein of this, but they didn't work in various ways, so I've frogged. Back to the drawing board. If only spindles and spinning wheels came complete with an automatic inspiration generator for what to do with relatively small amounts of yarn - things in the 200-300m area. Hats and scarves and gloves are the sorts of things I'm thinking about, but since I already have enough of those items and am fussy about (a) what I knit, (b) what I wear, and (c) what I want to do with my precious handspun, perhaps I should work on considering yarn as an FO in its own right, without feeling that I need to knit it into something immediately.

If there's a way to alter the order of the photos to the left, I can't work out what it is :-(

So, in slightly bizarre order, my latest adventures in fibre:

• (top picture) this is my first attempt at carding, using all the stray bits of fibre from my other projects, which I've been collecting in a pretty wooden bowl on a shelf next to my desk. It needs more work still, but I'm intrigued by the possibilities in carding
• (second picture) this is the end result of the purple and mauve I've been spindle-spinning, although it's not this bright in real life (actually, take this comment as applying to all of these pictures. Apparently there was actually light in my library this morning when I took the pics). It's three ply, two of bright purple and one of mauve, 200m, and really soft. I plied it on the wheel, because spindle-plying is the dullest thing ever. Not completely sure what I'm doing with this, but then that's true of so much of my spinning!
• (third picture) bright purple singles left over from the above. Maybe around 130m; not sure. I might leave this as singles, or I might two-ply it with itself, or I might just wait and see what other inspiration strikes
• (fourth picture) Remember what I said above about these pictures being too bright? That's especially true here. This yarn isn't actually glowing. Honest. This is  Valentine merino from Violet Green that Dyddgu traded me for the ex-Jaywalker sassy stripes. I still think I got the better part of the deal :-) This is my first real wheel-spun, and technically it's a bit of a mess - the singles are over-spun, and then I underplied it, so it's pretty hopeless. But the colours are gorgeous, and it feels beautifully soft and velvetty knitted up, so I don't care :-) Talking of knitting up, the knitting visible in the pic is my second attempt with this yarn. I started off thinking I'd make something in reversible entrelac, because the way the colours work seemed well suited to entrelac's small blocks, but I don't much like its onesidedness. Alternating squares of stocking and reverse stocking stitches seemed like a great idea, and I intend to try it again sometime with smooth yarn to see if it's inherently flawed, or if it was just let down by my uneven yarn. Anyway, I frogged it, and am now making an attempt on the Dashing fingerless gloves from Knitty. Which I like so far, although I've been neglecting them for other pursuits (such as the Shadow and Ghost socks, and the next picture...)
• (fifth picture) Peacock yarn-in-progress! This is my current project. I'm a bit over halfway through spinning the dark green (Petrol from Texere), and then I'll do the dark blue (Rich Royal, ditto) and the light blue (Cornflower, ditto ditto), and ply the lot together. And then I'll look at it and think about how pretty it is, and fail to decide what to knit with it but I Don't Care :-)
  
• (sixth picture) The rest of the Texere order that supplied the above. A big (400g) bag each of purple and dark red, and a bunch of small (50g) bags of other colours. When I made the order, I was thinking about doing some blending with the hand cards that came with the wheel, but having discovered that it's actually quite a lot of work, and that I like blending-by-plying, that might not actually happen. Still, should keep me in fibre for a while.
• (seventh picture) This is the sample for the Peacock. It's spindle- rather than wheel-spun, just because it's easier to do tiny quantities that way, and I was sampling for colour rather than for spin.

I don't yet want to spin in front of the TV - it requires too much attention, and it's still fun in its own right, so it seems like a waste - so just because I've been spinning, doesn't mean I haven't been knitting, too. We've been watching a lot of spooks, during which I've mostly been knitting the clapotis that's in the top picture. It's boring, so it's good TV knitting, and the gaps between the exciting dropping of stitches aren't too long, so there's something to look forward to all the time.

The second picture is the scrap scarf I mentioned below. It's been ongoing for ages, and probably will be for ages more, but it's shaping up nicely, and it means I only have to throw away leftover pieces that are too short to have two knots tied in them, which is good because I hate throwing away tiny bits of pretty (in the same vein, I'm keeping all my tiny wispy bits of spinning leftovers in a bowl next to my desk, with the thought of trying to spin them all together when I'm proficient enough to try it).

I have also knit a row or so of the goth space invaders (black and purple bmp), but I'm just not enjoying it. I need to persevere so I get the hang of the stranding, which will make it more fun, but at the moment it's just annoying and fiddly, and I'm channeling all of my perseverance and determination into trying to finish off my various academic assignments by the end of the semester, so the socks will have to wait.

While I'm waiting for the dyed yarn to dry (it is looking more dyed as it dries, phew), I've cast on Jaywalker for friend-R. I've heard they come up tight, so I'm using that as an excuse to use slightly larger needles (2.5mm) which just happen to be my favourite sock needles - two short Addi circs. I haven't got 2.25mm needles anyway, although I think I might need to buy some...

This is where I'm up to with the clapotis. Well, actually, I'm further along than that, because I've done another pattern repeat or so since I took the photo. I'm more than halfway through now (which is good because I'm nearly halfway through my yarn!), and I still really like this. I'm starting to get bored with knitting it, though, which is why this post will go on to talk about plans and schemes that are forming in my mind ;-) Still, the clapotis is good mindless TV knitting, so I don't think I'll abandon it, even while thinking about other things I could knit!

There's a slight problem with a couple of the  stocking-stitch-stripes, where my fingers got confused with "kfb" and "ktbl", and increased some stitches when they were supposed to be only twisting them, so a couple of the stripes are rather bulbous, which you can see in the picture to the right - counting down from the top-right, the second and third stocking-stitch-stripes are swollen near the top. Probably no one but me (and now you!) will ever notice, though.

The plots and schemes I mentioned earlier are to do with the sock yarn that arrived with the clapotis yarn - blue and green Cascade Sassy Stripes, and Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in "Valentine" (still much pinker and tamer in real life, but in my head it's still the colour of blood oozing from a heart. Which probably makes me really gross, but never mind). I swatched the Cascade last night; I don't have the needle size the Jaywalker pattern calls for, just the one below and the one above, but even with the smaller one, my gauge is way off, and the number of cast-on stitches would produce an enormous tube, so I think I'll have to rejig the pattern. Fortunately, it comes in nice simple repeats, and the length of each zig-zag is also adjustable, so it should be really straightforward once I've re-swatched properly. Which I will probably put off, because I hate swatching in the round - either you have to cast on millions of stitches to make a tube wide enough to measure properly, or you leave loose yarn around the back, but then the three-or-four stitches on the edges are too loose to be any good at all, and it's really fiddly to manage. Sadly, my purl tension is different from my knit tension, so I do have to do circular swatches.

The Lorna's Laces is more troublesome. I knew when I bought the Cascade that it would be for Jaywalkers; all I knew about the Lorna's Laces is that it would be socks for me. I hadn't really got any idea what kind of socks. Now I have a plan to test out - more swatching! - to see if it works with the variegated yarn. The colours are fairly similar, so I think it might well work. The plan is (surprise, surprise!) cables. Frax suggested using my triskell cable on socks, and since the jumper of doom is destined for frogging, I still want something knitted with the thing, having designed it. So I'm going to swatch that, and see how it works. And because a whole sock will be two cable repeats around (give or take a few ribs), I might as well guess a number of stitches and actually cast on for a toe-up sock and see if it works. (Has to be toe-up because the pattern is charted bottom-up, and I'm too lazy to rechart it.) I'm going to use the toe-up heel-flap method from Baudelaire, because I like it, and because it gives me a good number of stitches to be able to start the back cable panel on the heel flap itself, which I think would be rather cool.

I'm not sure the colours are coming out quite right in this picture (not helped by being photographed on my bright red sofa), but then none of the colours are quite what I was expecting from the Get Knitted site either. Not that this matters - they're all still perfectly good colours :-)

I've just wound the first skein of Fyberspates' Scrumptious into a ball, and it's the softest thing ever. I'm itching to go and get needles to cast on for the clapotis immediately - it's going to be lovely.

The Lorna's Laces is much more purpley-pink in real life, and less bloody-muscle, but that's probably for the best. The colour variations are quite subdued for a variegated, which I like, although I'm still not sure which pattern I'll use it on.

Finally, the Cascade Sassy Stripes isn't the colour I originally chose (which they only had one skein of), and it's a bit brighter than anticipated, but its intended recipient will probably still like it. And she assures me that "zig-zag stripes" (ie Jaywalker) will be acceptable ;-)