Post-Olympics projecting..

So, the Olympics are over and as much as I love my Fair Isle 101 sweater, I've not been terribly interested in knitting much lately. This is not all that surprising - in addition to having just finished a large and intense period of knitting every day, work has gone somewhat 'splodey (it's not only "survey season" it's also when all the committees on campus realize they have reports due and start requesting data, and when faculty start thinking about summer research projects and want to meet to discuss what data might be available for them to work with, not to mention that I have been or will be in Madison nearly every week this month for various meetings and appointments (though one of those trips is personal, admittedly)), and it's time for spring and summer eventing to pick up, so I need to devote at least a little time to getting ready for that.

So, I haven't done much knitting. I think I mentioned (maybe?) that I finished the second pair of cotton socks awhile back. I'm now finished with the first sock of the third pair, so I've got some fun new socks to wear, but that's about the extent of my new projects. I'll try to remember to get pics of the socks at some point.

I've continued to work on Rogue, though not really as vigorously as originally. I forget if this week was the 4th or the 5th, but I think it's the 5th. I don't have a photo (I don't think) of where I was after last week, but I had divided for the front and back. This week I finished the back:



Not very exciting, but progress all the same. Hopefully by Monday I'll have some renewed energy to tackle the front with the neck shaping/cable (though I'm having a crown build-up done Monday morning, for which I'll be sedated and therefore have the day off; that either means I'll get more time to knit once the sedative wears off, or I'll not be at all interested in knitting because I'll be groggy and in pain).

So what, you might ask, *have* I been doing, since it's fairly well established that I'm no good at not doing anything.



Yup. That's not the RAOK from mamacate, though. It's a bit of unknown (at least to me) grey roving that Pixel gave me (gosh was it really two years ago?) to use to start to learn to spin. It languished, but now that I have a better handle on what I'm doing, I'm spinning it up. Now that I have the basics more or less down, I'm trying to work on consistency of spin and thickness. I tend to draft "too long", so the spin doesn't work through the yarn with the same consistency - some is overspun and some is underspun - so I'm trying to figure out my optimal draft length (I'm sure there are technical terms for all this that I'm simply too lazy to look up). I think once I get that part down, I'll be all ready to attempt plying with this yarn (they make it sound so easy, but I'm dubious!). And then I'll move onto the RAOK from mamacate and see about making my first real, well-balanced yarn with which I can knit a real finished project!