Well, its been a while.... and for that, I'm sorry. I hate falling out of blogging (as I have so many times in the past.) This time though, its really been because I just haven't been doing a lot. My days, while busy, have been a little monotonous.

Typical Day:

Play with Munch during the morning.

Eat lunch with Munchkin (shown here enjoying a tortilla chip (a favorite food recently) at McAlister's Deli)

Nap.

Play the afternoon away.

There has been little time for much else--and what little time I do seem to have is spent lying fairly motionless on the couch trying to not be sick from morning sickness or trying to catch a small nap myself.

However....the morning sickness is beginning to taper off and is really only evident if I do something silly, like overeat (yum...mexican food) or eat something sweet on an empty stomach (darn you chocolate chip cookie temptress!). With that turn of events...I've been hankering for a little hot fiber action.

I knit a bit...but its plain black stockinette in the round. Boring and hardly worth taking pictures since we all know black yarn takes craptastic photos. Thankfully, I've also been spinning again.

Inspired by Abby's How to Make a Tweed Batt, I hauled the drum carder out of its hibernation in the guest room and tried it out myself.

The Prep:

Here we have the inputs. From Left to Right:

Two Shades of Blue BFL for the base color,
Yellow BFL,
Leftover Merino/Tencel Blend in the Aspen colorway from Spunky Eclectic (this stuff was a dream to spin...I can't believe I forgot about this little leftover),
Red BFL,
an 80/20 Merino/Silk blend, also from Spunky Eclectic--unknown colorwary,
Orange BFL,
and some Red and Blue Merino (leftovers from my first ever fiber purchase from hello yarn--ahh..memories.
And, finally, across the top some white Merino.

Also pictured is my sprite zero. I am never without one of those, people.

First trip through the carder:

Still lots of blocks of color. I'm not going for novelty or stripy yarn, so it goes through again...

Still a little stripetastic...another trip through:

Nice. I can still see some of the individual colors but this batt is nice and blended.

The Yarn:

Three Ply (chain plied, my personal favorite--look ma! no leftovers!)
18 WPI
About 84 Yards
1 oz on the button.

I'm pretty happy with the spinning but I wish there had been a little more tweediness to it; its a little more "heathered" than "tweedy" Its all my fault though--it was hard for me to add a lot of the other colors to the blue to get enough pops of color. I really liked the process though and I'm going to try again! The Munchkin is out of town with her Dad visiting the in laws, so I have a whole FOUR DAYS to myself. Woohoo!