Fortuna volvat

So I brought home a spinning wheel on Saturday! I had the phenomenal good luck of being contacted by a lovely Ms. Appletree from Ravelry who mentioned she had an Ashford Traditional she was thinking of selling. Through a series of unexpected surprises and good turns of fortune, we met up this past weekend and behold, the wheel is now sitting in my living room while I beam happily at it from my couch.

I am not very good at spinning on a wheel! But thankfully I am also not very bad at it either. The practice on Mme Soho's Lendrum gave me a bit of a head start, and after work on Saturday I spent a few hours getting acquainted with my yet-unnamed wheel. I spun a full 2oz of blue Corriedale and plied it the next morning and it is hilariously bad compared to my spindle-spun yarn, but it is yarn all the same!

Can you see the unplied sections? Ha! 

The wheel is in fantastic shape, though. I took a trip down to Romni today and picked up an Ashford maintenance kit which is full of little bits and bobs to replace and repair anything that breaks, so pretty much if anything goes wrong at any point in the future I'll be set (I like tools and tinkering and whatnot.) I oiled all the oil-hungry parts, and I replaced the drive band which was a bit stretched out. Oh! And they had a newer flyer with different ratios, so I picked that up for super cheap, so now I have a two flyers and a lot of different speeds to spin at! But really this wheel just hums along nicely so I really think I only wanted an excuse to tinker around with moving parts.

Plus, the cats like to hang out with her, which is a bonus. She just fits seamlessly into our place!

So thank you, Appletree, for bringing this lovely wheel into my life! I haven't found a name for her quite yet, although I've almost settled on Jude: the internet tells me it means "thanks."

Spin, spin sugar!

Looks like I might be getting my spinning wheel today! Will update when I know more :D

UPDATE: Brought home a lovely Ashford traditional today! She's all mine! :D :D :D

Hand-picked, fair trade jellybeans.

Not a heck of a lot in knitting news. I've been working slowly on a lace project but haven't made much progress. I'm also still knitting a pair of cabled socks but it requires me to concentrate pretty hard on the cable chart, and I've just been too busy to dedicate the time to thinking so hard about something. I am not very good at cable charts, as it turns out!

BUT! There has been an abundance of creativity nevertheless! Last night my bridesfolk came over and helped me assemble our wedding favours. It was complicated work: a lot of stamping, gluing, grommet-hammering, tying, and jellybean wrangling, but it all paid off. I think they look absolutely spectacular, even if they're just simple little bags of jellybeans. I also can't thank Ms. Soho enough for agreeing to hand-write every single one of those 70 tags.  Her writing was just perfect for what we were trying to do.

Favours ahoy!

That's a big tray of favours! The ribbons are green and brown, and much lighter than the picture shows.

The green script in the background is in German! I have no idea what it says, but it sure was a beautiful stamp.

The back, hand-written by my amazing Maid of Honour.

Time warp.

Where did July go? Like, seriously, I turned my back on it for one minute and then it was gone! This whole summer has gone by so fast, probably helped by the fact that I've been running around like crazy for most of it doing school work and stuff for the wedding.

We're a little over a month away from the wedding (5 weeks today!) and I'm still calm and composed. Though I did go a bit insane in the makeup aisle at Shoppers today, insisting that I needed about two dozen different shades of bronze eyeshadow for my "look." I am going to be so fucking pretty.

Since TdF finished, the spinning action chez KtYT has slowed down considerably. There has, however, been an interesting development as of late: a good friend who is a cabinetmaker and woodworker has been improving his work on the lathe recently, and thinks he'd like to turn his hand at making a drop spindle or two, perhaps even starting up a little business. We met this week and talked spinning and I showed him the more technical aspects of drop spindling and he's started drafting out a few designs. He loves working with exotics and lately he's been making segmented bowls and cups with a high-polish finish, and he thinks he could work elements of that into his spindle design. In the meanwhile, I'll help him with the physics of it all, making sure the balance and weight is consistent and that there's a nice, sustained spin. So hopefully sometime after the wedding myself and my spinning buddies might have a little bit of testing to do, and hopefully help with the launch of a new spindle business.

In non-spinning news, I durrped my way through my first Zimmerman pattern: a February baby sweater. Not *too* many mistakes, considering how cryptic her pattern-writing was. It's a classic piece, though, and every baby should wear one. Hopefully the recipient, a co-worker, won't pop quite yet so I have time to seam the sleeves. Pics to follow, assuming the weather stays as lovely as it has been for the past few days: 24, sunny, with a cool breeze. Pray it stays this way for the entire month of August and right up through September 11th. Then it can get as hot as it bloody well wants and I won't care. Though the poor baby swaddled in wool might.