Spinderella's Goodies and Creating Two Knitters!!

In an effort to simplify my move across the country, I shipped off the stockpile of spinning fleeces to Spinderella for processing.  Well, the roving arrived the other day.  Oh my goodness is it gorgeous and boy is there ever a lot of it.  I knew they were going to ship me 60-70 pounds of roving back, but it just didn't occur to me how much roving that really is until it was piled up in my living room.  Oh dear am I going to be busy spinning (and then knitting and weaving) for a good long time.

And to top it all off, there's an alpaca show in town this weekend *and* I discovered that the mother of one of Boy's co-workers is a spinner/knitter and raises her own sheep because she's picky about her fleeces.  I knew I shouldn't have told myself that I didn't really need to buy any more spinning fiber in the next year.

There is some bad news though: the yarn shop a mile down the road from where I live may be closing soon.  The owner needs to sell it by the end of May.  The big sale on everythign in the store starts next weekend.  I really don't need any more yarn or needles either, but I'll stop by anyway.  I'll be really bummed out if they close.  I was so looking forward to hanging out at Friday night knitting. *pout*

To end on a more positive note, I seem to have created a monster or two.  I taught my Niece to knit not long ago.  She picked it up rather quickly.  Of course she'd sat in my lap and watched me knit for quite some time previously, but then I went and bought her the Disney learn to knit kit (contains a pair of plain single point needles and a pair of single points with the non-pointy end bent into the Mickey ears shape, plus a few other notions and a how-to book).  We picked out a worsted-weight yarn in a color Niece liked and I cast on about 15 stitches for her.  Over two days, she knit up a couple inches of garter stitch.  My Nephew then wanted to try, but he figured out pretty quickly that he didn't have the fine motor control to manipulate the stitches and moved on to a different activity. 

Now my Sister has taken up knitting, ostensibly so that she can help my niece when she gets stuck.  Sis mentioned to me the other night that she had no desire to turn on the TV in the evening and just wanted to sit knitting or reading.  She also confessed to having picked up Niece's knitting to fix it and ended up putting it down 10 rows later.  Methinks she's hooked.  At the moment Sis is making a doll blanket while Niece makes a scarf.  Niece has planned "a sweater for daddy" as her next project and Sis is going to make a scarf, just as soon as she finds a nice soft washable yarn in a periwinkle blue.  I'm thinking a gift certificate to a yarn shop may be in order....