Christmas Presents

I haven't had a chance to blog this week, I'm afraid.  DD2 was fine when she went to school on Monday morning, but after she came home, she started to look a bit pale and even went as far as to lie on the sofa with her head in my lap, which is most unusual for her.  She's come down with a nasty cold of some sort and Monday night was spent with me waking every couple of hours because she'd woken up crying, with a raised temperature.  I think she also had a bad headache as she kept holding her head and shrieking and didn't want to use the non-leak cup she has in her bedroom at night.  I think sucking on it made her head hurt more.  Fortunately, she's on the mend and is now her usual mischievous self, despite coughing regularly.  As such, she's been off school since Tuesday and it's been a bit of a long week.

Last time I posted, I promised to tell you about my Christmas presents.  Hubby went a bit overboard really. I'd asked for enough Brooklyn Tweed Loft yarn to make a cardigan.

But I didn't get any Loft yarn.

Instead, he bought me a pair of small diamond stud earrings (I've got another pair he bought me ten years ago, but they're for best - these are apparently 'for every day'!).  He also bought me a new laptop as my other one had missing keys, the battery was so knackered it only worked when attached to the mains and the screen casing was coming away from the screen.  Totally unexpected and, as I said, much much more than I expected.

Then, there was a box.  A fairly sizeable box.  And in it was this:

An Ashford drum carder.  To say it was a bit of a surprise is very much an understatement.  A drum carder is something that I've thought would be nice to have, but very unlikely to happen (at least until the girls' feet stop growing).  I've had a little play with it on some fibre I'd got in the lap-waste bag from World of Wool, but the week before Christmas I'd started spinning 500g of North Ronaldsay, which came ready to spin.

Hubby then went into the hall and came back in with one of those felt Santa sacks that children's presents often get put in.  It was filled with fleece/fibre to card and spin.  More shock/surprise from me.

In the sack was:

400g scoured/washed Polwarth
527g brown llama
556g scoured/washed white Bluefaced Leicester
200g de-haired yak
566g black llama
400g scoured/washed Falkland
545g cream llama
200g scoured/washed mixed coloured Norwegian lambswool (I've since bought another 400g of this so I've got enough for a sweater when I get round to spinning it all up).

Was I spoiled, or what?  Here's a photo of my fibre stash (and my hand-carders on top).  The box is the one that our new incinerator (galvanised bin-size) was delivered in, so you can get an idea of how much I've now got (and I think there's another 500g bag of something in with my yarn).  The box is more or less full.

I also made the decision to go through all my yarn and fibre and write down what I've got.  I'm halfway down my third sheet of lined A4 paper and still have a fair way to go.  Oops.  I've been lucky in that Danya, the lovely lady who sits on DD2's school taxi, supervising the children and who has become a friend, gave me two vacuum bags, so as I've been listing the yarn, I've been putting it in one of those and then will use my Dyson to suck all the air out of it to compact it a bit!

I've spent several hours over the last few weeks reading up about drum carding and preparing fleece for spinning and I think you'll agree that with the yarn and fibre I'd already got in my stash I have enough to keep me going for quite some time.

Not that that stopped me from buying a ball and a skein of sock yarn from Modern Knitting earlier this week.  I needed a ball of pink King Cole merino blend 4ply (honestly - I did; I'll tell you about that another time) and the ball of sock yarn is one I haven't used before - Hjertegarn Kunstgarn 4ply/sock yarn - and the skein is Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in a colour called Zombie.  I couldn't resist that name, could I!

I have been doing some knitting.  In fact, I'm so behind in my blogging that something I was going to show you as a WIP has become an FO.

I'll be back next week.  Have a good weekend.  It snowed here overnight so I think I'll be walking to and from work tomorrow evening - it's not that far, but as I don't finish until 11.15pm I'll have to come the long way round using the proper streets rather than the lanes that run between the houses on our development.  As I mentioned last year when it was snowy, we live up a hill and the road gets icy and it's a bit hairy trying to drive up it.