Entrelac Stole #2 is Done!! Plus Mole and Handspun!

Yes- I finished the Entrelac Stole and blocked it today- YaY! Here's some pics:





I love it! It's a lot more colorful than the last one. At some point I will dig all the Noro tags out of the project bag and list all the colorways I used.

Earlier this week I made Mole for the first time. It was very yummy and a culinary adventure. I took several recipes that I found online and adapted them for the ingredients I could lay my hands on and the amount of work I was willing to do.
It was a little weird putting chocolate, tomatoes and chilies in a sauce together, but it turned out fantastic!
The mole, delicious as it is, isn't terribly photogenic, so I only have pictures of the ingredients:


I made fresh corn tortillas to go with it and I don't have to tell you what a treat that was.

I've also started swatching my alpaca, silk handspun, and it is luscious! Here's a picture (sorry it's sideways):


I feel like I've had a very creative week already, and it's only Wednesday. I wonder what else I'll do?

Handspun Beauties

Finally have pictures of that handspun that I've been bragging about.
I love, love, love this yarn. It is soft and beautiful and slightly fuzzy and it has a gorgeous sheen- and I managed to both blend the colors through plying and retain some of that "color that glows from within" quality- but much of this doesn't show in my pictures:



This is a 14wpi 2 ply. Halcyon Fibers. I got roughly 400 yds. from 4 oz. alpaca 40%, silk 40%, merino 20%

I'm still having a hard time with the light and color in my photos though. I may have to break down and take a class or read a book about it, as intuiting the necessary things to do to fix these problems hasn't worked.

In other spinning news, I've been teaching myself a semi-woolen knitting technique- with the help of Judith Mackenzie McCuin's Teach Yourself Visually Handspinning, which I checked out from the library. It took a lot of patience to keep at it after I broke the thread for the hundredth time, but now I'm getting a consistent thread with the qualities of a woolen yarn: fuzzy. I'm using the technique that she recommends for angora rabbit, where in you allow some twist into the drafting area, but it is a forward, and not especially long, draw. I thought this would be a good way to ease myself into long draw. It's working really well for the angora/merino blend I'm using. The colors of the batt are deep and murky: dark blues and purples, with some gray and green. It has surprising bits of lilac and light blue that break up the darkness. It reminds me of tide pools on the Oregon coast on a cloudy day.

I'm still knitting. Nothing has been finished for what seems like a long time. I just downloaded Laura Chau's (that links to her blog) Flora and Fauna trio as I want to knit the Honeybee Cardi (this is a rav link) really bad. But I want to finish my stole first, and my friend is having a baby that I need to start knitting for too. If only I could spend my days knitting, instead of teaching! Not! I'm smart enough to realize that I love my knitting time precisely because it is rare.

This will have to be my Craft or Bust check-in also, because I spent all last week and part of this one avoiding technology. I'm not sure why, but I didn't check my email or read any blogs or look at Ravelry- nothing. But break's over.