Excitement Afoot

I’ve been making some progress on my mawata mittens! These are taking longer than I thought they would, but I suppose it makes sense when I need to stop and prepare the silk every few rows . Between that and the fact that silk is not very elastic, my fingers get tired quickly so I can’t knit on these for very long stretches of time. But they sure are pretty, aren’t they?

BMFA Mawata/Silk Hankies, colorway Aurora Borealis

You can see in the cuff where the stitches look all wonky that it took me some time to figure out how much to tug on the silk fibers to get them to a thickness I liked before knitting with their supremely fluffy selves. Closer to the needles the stitches are smaller and more even because I became accustomed to what I need to do. I  decided to add a thumb gusset to these (on the other side) due to the aforementioned inelasticity of silk. I’m kind of winging it, though, so I hope it works out ok! I've knit thumb gussets in other patterns, but I'm not following any of those at the moment out of laziness and am just going with my gut. Living on the edge!

The other exciting thing afoot (sidebar: wouldn't "Excitement Afoot" make a great sock pattern title? I call dibs!) is represented by these:

Weeeeeeee!

I'm going to start learning to spin! I was inspired by some recent blog posts I'd read (this was one of them, be warned that it is a sad but beautiful post, and this was another) and some threads on Ravelry discussing spinning-- I couldn't resist the idea of playing with different fibers and turning them into yarn,  I had caught the bug. My darling Fiasco agreed that a drop spindle would make a good birthday gift so I'll have one shortly! I've already read through the "Start Spinning" book he gave me early and half of the "Respect the Spindle" book. I have to wait until Tuesday before I can actually start spinning, though. I can hardly contain my excitement!!!

Sigh. I don't think the idea of spinning one's own yarn from various types of fiber does this to normal people...