I haven’t been feeling much like thinking at the end of the day lately, so it’s been nice to have a mindless spinning project to work on when I get home from work.

It’s also nice to have a pile of finished yarn.

I forgot to measure the total weight before washing to set the twist, but the final length is just over 3200 yds. The yarn is a fingering weight 2-ply, and will make a beautiful colorwork sweater one of these days.

This is something of an unusual spinning project for me. Normally, I only spin up the fiber when I’m actually ready to start knitting. This time, I knew what yarn weight I wanted, so I just went ahead and spun it up without a project in mind. I’m expecting that it will go back into the stash to marinate for a while longer before I knit the actual garment, but it’s nice to have it ready to go as soon as I get around to the design. (It’s also helpful to know how much length I have in each color when planning a colorwork design).

When not spinning away at the Shetland, I’ve been knitting on Branden’s new Basketweave sweater:

It’s currently too big to stretch out on the needles, but since it’s a raglan you can get a pretty good idea of the overall design just by looking at the increase sections. I put a tiny cable along the increases, and am working the basketweave as an allover pattern in between. The fabric did flatten out a little bit with blocking, but it has a nice drape at this gauge. I decided not to go down a needle size because I’m not sure I have that much extra yardage, and because we didn’t want the final fabric to be too stiff. This sweater is about 6 sts/in on size 3’s, so it’s moving along pretty quickly, and I’m really enjoying the texture and the squishiness of the yarn.