Don't Feed Them after Midnight...

...and never, EVER, get them wet. That applies to suri alpacas as well as Gremlins. I just blocked this hat and OH MY GOD does it smell like a rutting beast! I'm praying, PRAYING, that the smell dissipates after it dries because I've spent a good amount of time working on this "Braid and Bobble Hat" (from Fiber Trends), and frankly, it has been a pain in my ass. While I'm quite pleased with the appearance of the cables and braids, I couldn't remember the repeats so I had to keep looking at the pattern, flipping it back and forth to remind myself the difference between Cr3R, Cr3L and C5B. I should have just written the abbreviations on a post-it so I didn't have to keep flipping the pattern over, but I got too lazy to take the time to save some time. This is going to be a present for someone who doesn't read this blog, so hopefully she'll never know the olfactory experience that is this hat (until she wears it in the rain...)

My Rogue hoodie is coming along very nicely and even more importantly, it fits! It's kind of a perfect fit and I was going for some ease, but I haven't blocked it yet and I'm pretty confident that it will stretch a little bit at that point. The cables look great but I found out that I'm really terrible at seaming -- I had to seam the shoulders and it really looks amateurish. I won't show you because I don't think I want to re-do them at this point so I'm just going to live with it -- anyway, what am I if not a amateur apprentice to the knitting gurus?

I think I'm going to get hooked on spinning pretty quickly. I spent several hours at Jessica's house on Sunday, spinning away on her Lendrum. It was my first wheel experience, and I really loved it. And I love Jess, who owns all the equipment one would need to march a flock of sheep in one door and a thousand skeins of yarn out the other -- including some innocent-sounding combs that have teeth big enough to scare a tiger. And she had a bag of fleece that was truly fresh from the sheep -- and smelled like it, too -- worse than the wet suri hat, but still strangely alluring. My spinning classes start in January!