Birthday Craft Day

Last Saturday was my birthday, and I had a craft day party to celebrate. We had a great time, and I worked on a bunch of projects. My friend Carolyn and I started with felted soaps (which I forgot to photograph). It's a very easy, super fun project - and you get to play with soap suds!

My friend Qiongling wanted to learn to knit. She picked it up really quickly. Here she is with the first of TWO potholders she made:
I did some spinning. I finished spinning the blue roving into singles, and then I plied it together with the spindle-spun stuff I made before I got the wheel. The quantity of wheel-spun singles was significantly larger than the quantity of spindle-spun singles - you can see the rest on the bobbin in the lower right in this picture. Another issue was that the spindle-spun singles were more over-twisted than the wheel-spun singles. So mixing them was maybe not the best idea in the world. I'm still figuring out how I'm going to make the rest of the wheel-spun singles into two-ply yarn. I think I might run it through the machine again, put a bit more twist into it, and end up with two bobbins with a roughly equal amount of singles, and ply those together. I feel like I've learned a lot from this experiment. We'll see how the yarns turn out (and I'm looking forward to more fiber I've ordered arriving so I can put my new knowledge to use).
I also knitted a bit on my "colloquium socks." I was informed that this was cheating, and I needed to disclose that on the blog.
For some extra disclosure, Robert and I went backpacking over Spring break last week, and I did a good amount of knitting on our long drive there and back. I'm pretty close to being done (Hallelujah!)