What I'm working on right now...

...are the Celtic stole, which I keep having the same problem with, and spinning roving into yarn. Some nights the spinning goes well, other nights, it's bigger than I'd like, but I have come up with sort of a system to make almost uniform in size.



With the stole, I get to the part where I start knitting the first knot, and when I get to the other side of the knot, I start having trouble...winding up with too many or not enough stitches. Now, when I get to the odd rows, I am going to mark off the second side before I knit it to make sure I have enough stitches. I don't have much choice if I want it to look fairly decent.

I frogged back to row 40 and I am getting ready to do a few hours of straight knitting on it this evening after I get some chores done.



I wish I was finished with it by now. I know things take me longer than most people, but I'm getting kind of sick of looking at it. If I could get past the first knot, I probably wouldn't be so tired of working on it. I think I just figured it would be simpler than it is.



I love this picture so I thought I'd load it up again. This was how it looked before I started breaking it up and spinning it.

This is what I have spun so far.



Of course, it's not true to the actual color. It doesn't really look gorgeous since it's not all finished, but I intend to finish it before the year is up.



On the roving, I have decided to separate it in strips according to color, spin all the green ends together and all the cranberry ends together as one long strip (which I've only done once, this past week, after several practice attempts. This gave me a plan for the rest.)

There are two color repeats in this bigger strip I have left, plus one more section of apple green. (If this looks like some kind of bloody, neon mess I apologize. Pictures of roving that look like afterbirth turn me off, even if they're a true representation of cranberry or red, so I hope I haven't done that on this blog.)

Anyway, I split the section of roving that I broke off down the middle. Then I split those halves in half, and those halves in half again, making twelfths. (I think I may do one more split after that; I'm losing count. lol) They winded up being fairly skinny. It seems like they're making a heck of a lot of yarn, too. It got to where I'd spun for about an hour and had hand cramps from holding the yarn firmly for the draft.



I do feel much better about spinning it up than I did after the first couple of attempts. It looks much better as I wind it up. I have given up on making it all laceweight, but there's a bunch of black roving on etsy that I've got my eye on to ply with it. The only problem is my reluctance to spin that roving before plying it. It looks so shiny and pretty. I feel like it would really set off the colors of the roving, better than plying two strands of the Yarn Love hand spun together.

I don't know if I should get some black roving and spin it, or if I will just take the easy way out and ply it up with some prepurchased yarn. The more I think about it, the more I like that prepurchased idea.

I need to go look up something about how to connect two sections of hand spun into one. I don't see how plying would work without my doing that.