Sip n Stitch is here!

From Blog photos

Okay, so this came last week. Monday I think? Anyway, yesterday it was finally sunny enough to take a photo of the package. It was really hard to resist waiting until today to open up the coffee. I don’t know what it is about the coffee that the Unique Sheep send, but it always seems to be amazing and have tons of caffeine in it. The coffee beans I buy here (either from the supermarket or from a coffee stall at the farmers market) just don’t have that same kick. The mug is super cute and has been officially designated being MY mug. O and N know that it’s mine alone to use. Just like the other Unique Sheep mug I received in a previous round of Sip N Stitch from a few years ago. MY mugs. Mine.

Now that that’s been cleared up, onto other things! First up, spinning! I am so close to being done that I’m almost giddy. Turns out I got three small hanks from the fibre. It looks to be fingering weight, 2-ply. Well, I know it is 2-ply since I just plied it, but I haven’t measured my wpi yet. The first hank is fully plied, twist set, dried, wound onto niddy noddy and calculated yardage, and twisted up into a hank, but I still need to weigh it. The next step for the second batch is to go on the niddy noddy. Third batch needs to be dunk & thwacked. I only just finished plying it. I was determined to get it done before writing up this week’s post. And yay, I did!

As for my knitting, I’ve still got the Ruba’iyat mittens going. Had a few false starts: the green wasn’t contrasting enough so I frogged it all and restarted with an orange-y red and the same yellow, then I cast on the wrong number to stitches so I had to restart again. It’s gotten to the point where this has become a process knit for me. I like knitting it, but I’m just not thrilled with the end result like I usually am. So that’s going a bit slow. I’m going to cast on a very quick project later on tonight. We’re doing Secret Santa at work again this year (limit is £5.00), and the person that I got I know pretty much nothing about. But I do see them reading during their lunch breaks so I’m going to get a £5.00 gift card to Waterstones and knit a bookmark. I’ve also got most of my family’s presents sorted out. Obviously, I can’t list them here, but there are a few quick projects that I’m planning on churning out during my week off.

Oh look at that, it’s my week off! Glorious sleeping in? You’d think I’d try to sleep in as much as I can. But no, my body won’t let me. Woke me up at 7:30 today (it’s a Sunday for crying out loud) and I just felt silly trying to fall back asleep at that time, so I got up and watched an episode of Mad Men while I waited for O & N to get up. I like not having to worry about being quiet while cleaning.

I’ve also finally caught up with my RSS feed (had almost 200 entries to read/watch last week!). So now I’m looking for new stuff to watch/read. Any recommendations? To give you an idea, I currently watch Yarnivore and Round the Twist with Carin. I also listen to Cast On, ChopBard and CraftLit. I have a few episodes of 2 Knit Lit Chicks downloaded, but I haven’t listened to them yet. Can you tell I was an English Lit major? Speaking of English Lit, on a whim I checked out what classes my old university is offering for the degree I did. They all sound so cool. They’re offering lit classes like “Demons, Degenerates And New Women: Fin De Siecle Fictions” and “Renaissance Magic” and “Other Worlds: Utopia To Lilliput” and “Haunting Texts: Victorian And Modern Ghost Stories” and “Romantic Eroticism” and… I wanna take all of these classes! Why can’t I be a student for the rest of my life? Or why doesn’t either of the Sheffield universities offer cool classes like these as night classes? I seem to really want to be a student again. I’ve even started dreaming about it. Last night I dreamt that my dad sent me back to Montana since I was so happy there. I even had my old roommate Michelle rooming with me! Apparently she needed three more credits (ie one class) to graduate. But O really wasn’t happy with this and he was all grumpy because he thought I’d be there for a whole year and it turns out that it was only for six weeks but he still didn’t like it and… really, the dream didn’t make a lot of sense after that. So instead of getting to be a student again, I’m going to make up my own reading list from the ones listed for the modules I’m interested in and see how that goes.