Finished Object Friday, 6/22/2012

So, I mentioned on Wednesday that even though I've been absentee, I have managed to make a FEW things in the last month or so. This is primarily been my spinning (and spinning and spinning) and a brief foray in to knitting - the majority of my crafting is actually still in progress, since so much of my time is going to prepping the fleece I talked about on Wednesday!

Dish Cloths
I've been trying to go green in whatever ways I can. For example, I bought two sort-of washcloths that I've been using and washing instead of paper towels for tasks like scrubbing the bathroom. This has been a raging success - the same two cloths have done the trick for several years now. Now, my dish sponges weren't quite as disposable as paper towels, but even so, the damn things fall apart within a few months, so I figured...I should give it a try! Make a couple dish cloths out of cotton and see if they last longer than sponges would have. And, because of Nerd Wars and my inestimable love for Supernatural, I made them aligned for the show.

The top one isn't too legible, so I'm gonna leave it that way, and the bottom one says "Jerk." (they are the two main characters nicknames for each other). Considering I've never done a chart like this before, I'm not at all unhappy with how they turned out. I didn't block them or weave in the ends; I figured they'd just get out of whack again when I used them. "Jerk" has been in service all week, and so far I'm pretty satisfied! In particular, they hold soap better than I thought they would. I'm being careful to extra-soak stuff, since of course I've lost all scouring ability. :)

Rainbow spinning
At Maryland Sheep and Wool I bought 16 ounces of black-base with rainbow colors in it to spin. I LOVE rainbows. My determination was to use this, once spun, to make myself a skirt (I'm aiming for around 600 yards). So far, I've done 12 ounces (but the last I only finished today, so no pictures yet). I also taught myself to Navajo ply in May, and have used this project to practice on. All in all I'm pretty happy with how it's going. Here are the two skeins that are done so far:

Oddly, even though the blend is supposedly the same, the top one (which is the one I did first) ended up way more orange, and the bottom one way more blue. So far the third one looks to be somewhere in between, which is good - if they look TOO different I'll end up with a pretty wonky looking skirt. Interesting, the close ups of the two skeins look so similar I can hardly tell them apart! Yet at a distance, they are clearly pretty different.

Either way, I'm more-or-less in love with how it's turning out, and looking forward to finishing the fourth skein so that I can make my skirt, probably in July. So far, I've got 180 yards in one skein and 120 yards in the other (yeah, I wasn't quite as consistent with thickness as I'd like) but both are hovering around DK (just one is kinda heavy DK and the other is pretty much right on...). I think the third is closer to DK, too, though I haven't checked yet.

So...that's me! Check out what everyone else is up to this Fabulous Friday! Finished Object Friday and Fiber Arts Friday are filled with awesome blogs!