Pink!

 Or, I should say Scarlet! but it looks pink to me.

This is called Scarlet Ibis and it is a BFL from Miss Babs that I got at Rhinebeck last year. I love spinning it. I have finished spinning the singles and will be plying a 3-ply sock yarn tomorrow evening. It is a good color fix after hours of staring at computers.

The rest of this post is about recent acquisitions. What do you think about the two yarns below? One is the Briar Rose Polwarth I spun and the other is a merino/tencel yarn dyed by Briar Rose. The colors are amazingly similar. I am planning to combine them into a shawl - with the similar colors but different hands. The merino/tencel will be more drapey.

 On that note of similar colors, this is what I bought from Briar Rose at Camp. Two sets of BFL rovings that I think I will spin separately and ply together. I think the combo will give me a lot of depth but it could also be mud when plied together. Sampling is my friend!

 This is a silk/Coopworth mix from Hidden Valley Woolen Mills. I love the colors. I can't wait to see how it spins up.

 I bought some books at Camp but those will be in a different post. I received two books in the mail in the past couple of weeks and I am excited about them. The first is a book I won (yes, I won) in a random drawing from Serious Eats. When they review books, they usually get multiple copies to give away. I enter every time I find a book I like. And I won this! How cool is that?

 The other book is from Paperback Swap. I signed up a while ago and listed (and sent away) some books that I didn't want any more. I also put up a list of books that I wanted. I have received one or two that I wanted right away. For a while I would check to see where I was on the list for the books I wanted. All of them were highly requested so there is a list of folks waiting for them. Then I got tired of checking and forgot all about it.

So imagine my surprise when I got a notice that this book was being shipped to me. I had signed up for auto-request for books I really wanted. This eliminates the step of agreeing that you still want the book when it becomes available.

It arrived really quickly and is in excellent shape. The way Paperback Swap works is that you pay the postage when you mail people books and they pay when they send stuff to you. You get credits when you list a book and those credits apply to books that you request. You can also buy with money but so far I've acquired my books just with credits.

I've been mostly spinning as my elbow tendonitis has been acting up and knitting is not fun. I hope it heals soon.