WIP Wednesday - Back into Spinning!

I never got around to posting last week, so I've got a ton of stuff to share with you today :)

Inspired by the PrairieGirls Knit and Spin podcast, I decided to give my 9" circs another chance - taking their advice to do the cast-on and ribbing on magic loop and then not switching to the 9" until I reach the plain knitting part. It certainly did make it a lot easier, but I'm still not a huge fan. It just doesn't seem to go as fast as with magic loop and is a lot more fiddly. I think part of it may be that the 9" circ is too large(!!!) for my small leg, so I should really go down to an 8" in order to prevent having to move the stitches around all the time (one of the PrairieGirls mentioned that as being a challenge as well)... not sure I'm going to go out and buy one just to test the theory though. As it is, I'm going to keep at it for a full pair of socks to give it a proper shot... and then we'll see if that's the only pair ever I knit like that ;)

Perhaps that's why I also felt the need to cast on another pair of socks for the June challenge ;) I finished these in just 6 days! I think that's a personal record :) The yarn was a gift from Lars and the pattern is Cookie A's Wanida (with the FLK heel substituted in). Very potato-chippy indeed :) I never did learn the pattern off by heart, but it was extremely easy to read, so a quick knit regardless.

This weekend I FINALLY finished the Professor McGonagall blanket. Casting off took me nearly 2 hours! But so worth it in the end. It's knit in acrylic yarn, and probably at a looser gauge than it should have been, but I don't care - I love it! :D

And finally, I'm back into spinning :) Mum and Dad had bought me some lovely rainbow coloured corridale from New Zealand, but I'd kept telling myself that I had to finish my current spinning project before I could start it. This weekend I finally accepted that just wasn't going to happen anytime soon, and that I should let that stop me from playing with some nice, new fiber, so I sat down at the wheel and went nuts! It's the first time I've been back at the wheel for quite awhile, and the beginning of the yarn is accordingly lumpy, but the fiber was so much fun to play with, that I just couldn't let it go, and got it all spun and plied up in just 3 days! (I wonder how many calories you burn from that kind of spinning! ;) ). It's the first time I've ever done anything close to that amount of spinning on my wheel, and I've come to the conclusion that I really love it :-D I am SO grateful to Mum's friend for gifting it to me :-) :-) :-)

The fiber went from this

... to this...

... to this! (plied with commercial yarn to make the yardage stretch - a tip from the lovely Laura of the KnitGirllls Podcast (lalaknits on instagram))
Forgot to take a photo of it all skeined up after its bath, but I ended up with 137 grams and 155 meters :-) Now to decide what to knit with it!