Orange Camo Christmas

At 4:57 p.m. on Saturday I ran gasping into the Fedex Kinko's and mailed off the last of my handmade gifts. The guys at the counter laughed at me, but assured me that my box would get put on the truck - although it would be the very last one. The recipients of said gifts, Ma and Pa T., are avid readers of this blog (well, at least Ma T. is, I'm not sure that Pa T. could survive the excitement of reading about knitting), so that is enough said until Santa has safely made his way to their house tonight and the gifts have been opened.

Bird's nests. A camouflage Christmas bouquet.

Singles on the bobbin.Although it is fun to read about all you crazy knittin' folk running your fingers into the ground until all hours of the night (and early morning), I don't enjoy doing it myself. God forbid that I miss the big deadline, because a gift unmade at Christmas is a loathesome thing - I could never get myself to return to knitting it for the incredible resentment of the obligation. I have been smart enough to limit the handmade gifts to two per year, which keeps the level of insanity at a dull roar, but after the outright panic that I inflicted on myself this year, I've decided to go to an even lower-key system next year. I'm doing no handmade gifts, and will instead spend the season knitting Christmas gifts and ornaments for someday. That way I can enjoy seasonal knitting, look forward to giving handmade gifts sometime in the future, and be stress-free.

M's homemade sushi. Heaven.Anyhoo, this is all a long way of saying that on Saturday night I found myself quite happily unoccupied. No work. No obligatory crafting. (That should be a four-letter word, "obligatory crafting.") No cooking. (Moxie kindly went to Little Tokyo and picked up the ingredients for his famous homemade sushi - yum!) So I pulled out the Rose and a tube of merino that Marnie and I picked up in Solvang on our Portland Roadtrip, and began some pre-drafting festivities.

Looks strangely like the sushi, no?Pretty soon I began to realize that the color sequence in the tube was very likely to produce something akin to orange camouflage. But I was curious, so I persisted, and pre-drafted about half of the fiber into nests with four nests for each color. I spun half of the nests going in one direction on the "color wheel" and half on a second bobbin moving in the opposite "color wheel" direction. Each bobbin has two repeats of its individual sequence. Then I plied them together, and found that yes, an orange-olive camouflage-colored yarn was indeed produced by this combo, but I kind of like it. I'm not sure exactly what the heck I can knit with it, but it is pretty unique.

Orange Camo plied on the Rose. Just because.

The best part about the whole thing was that I got back to the (meager) level of spinning expertise that I acquired the last time I was spinning regularly. This is pretty nice, because I've done some "playing around" spinning in the interim that was piss poor, and I wasn't so sure that I would ever get back that feeling of simultaneous relaxation and focus that practiced spinning can provide. Even better, I feel like I am beginning to learn a little more. Some of the lessons that the fiber has to teach are sinking in and I'm beginning to employ some real techniques rather than just hacking my way through. Very exciting. Merry Christmas to me. And Merry Christmas to you, too. I'll see you on the flip side.