Boy did I go off on a tangent this weekend!

On Saturday evening, when Mr. Ink was preparing to head out for his night of live music, I had wandered into my craft room, looked at the boxes of dyed wool, and the large box of add in bits and bobs for the drum carder, and decided I wanted to pull some wool out and prep, JUST PREP, for the next set of batts. I pulled out 4 ounces total of two colors of brown, one lighter and one darker. Then grabbed my add ins, and got started. The goal was to take the browns and make them relatively similar by using mostly the same add ins on each batt. Just a few differences of color, but nothing major. As I went about it though, I realized that I was putting quite a lot of luxury fibers in there, so these batts would turn out amazingly soft.

I set the fiber piles back in my craft room for future drum carding. And went back to knitting and TV watching while Mr. Ink was out. But, as the evening wore on and I tired of TV watching, I couldn’t resist putting one, just one batt together out of my 6 piles of fiber. It was awesome. The next morning, before Mr. Ink woke up, I thought “Let me just do one more” and then by the time he woke up I’d done 3 more. And after breakfast I finished them up.

These started with BFL/silk top. I added some firestar, some very soft alpaca, cashmere, camel, bamboo, and tons of silk. There are silk noils, mulberry silk, tussah silk, and then I also added a huge amount of my current obsession, silk throwsters waste. Last year, all my batts had large amounts of recycled sari silk. This year it’s throwsters waste. I can’t get enough of it. I love the texture. I love how some of it is like regular silk, almost like in mawata silk form, and then some is like long silk threads, which make for extremely interesting spinning.

Well, here’s the thing. Now I had almost 9 ounces of freshly created batts, and that’s something quite irresistible to me. But, I also had a braid already on the wheel, so I figured “let me just finish that up” and so I did.

Of course, I didn’t ply because I wanted to, you know, just TEST the new batts. And so I “tested” them, by spinning them. For a really long time.

At lunchtime, Mr. Ink asked if I wanted to go for a bike ride. It was an exceedingly lovely day so naturally I said yes to that idea, and we went for a lovely bike ride. I asked Mr. Ink if he’d mind if I took the fat bike, since I know I can be a little slow on that bike. He said he didn’t mind, so I took it. We did a nice long loop from the house, as the wind was nothing to sneeze at, and we started out going into the wind. But when we turned and had the wind at our backs, I got that fat bike moving over 20 mph on a flat! I was really flying. It was great fun, the sound of those tires is like a tractor, so everyone knows you are coming up behind them and just moves out of the way. And other cyclists see that silly pink fat bike moving that fast and just grin ear to ear. I even left Mr. Ink in the dust for quite awhile. I had been a bit worried about trying to get that bike up the very large and long hill back to our house, it’s a tough hill even on my regular bike and I’d never tried that hill before. But the fat bike is geared appropriately for such things, and I actually had no trouble at all. It took TIME, but at no point did I think “I won’t be able to make it.”  I think I’ll stop asking Mr. Ink if he minds if I take that bike now, it’s clear that I am almost as fast with it now, and I keep up just fine. And I do so with comfort and a great deal of fun.

Once home, I decided it was time to drag out the table and a couple chairs for the back patio. And then my afternoon looked like this:

Yep, with 83F weather, it was time for a little outdoor spinning! And flower watching. They were visibly growing yesterday, I gained about 3 inches on my hyacinths throughout the day. And take a look at these daffodils!

Mr. Ink continued digging up sod, replanting it by the road, digging up soil, amending it, and placing it back where he wanted it to be. He’s got a bunch of trees coming in the next few weeks and is prepping the yard for that. I am glad he got quite a bit done, as it is to rain all week, and he’d have gone stir crazy otherwise.

He also mentioned the crocuses again, saying that he thought they’d look great in a rock garden. I suspect my vision of crocuses all over the front hill just may work!

In any case, I went off on quite a spinning tangent this weekend, and it was lovely, and we had a beautiful day. I need to stop just enjoying these beautiful days, and get something done, like scraping, sanding, and painting the door frame and window frames of the shop. At least then I’ll feel more productive while Mr. Ink is madly working in the yard!

Wishing everyone a great week!