All stitched up

and slightly more room inside my abdominal cavity. The troublesome and excruciatingly painful gall-bladder is no more, it is an ex gall-bladder that has shuffled off its mortal coil and can no longer turn me into a shivering, feverish, nauseous lump of green goo, incapable of speech or ... anything really.
The operation was a success, the nurses were lovely and overall the experience was as good as these things can be. I have a couple of stitches to be removed provided the nurse can decide whether they are dissolvable or not (I'm guessing not as it's now 10 days post-op and they're showing no signs of disappearing) and then I should be back to normal. I haven't tried driving again yet but will give it a go over the weekend probably.

I managed to finish a pair of socks during my hospital stay and the few days afterwards


Tofutsies yarn, my own pattern. Note the beautiful, sexy T.E.D. stockings

but apart from that, my knitting mojo seems to have deserted me. I have cast on one or two little things and finished off a few bits and pieces but nothing is really shouting "Knit me! KNIT ME!" at present. Obviously, since the op I've had a bit of time on my hands so it has been really frustrating to find myself in the midst of so much knitting time with nothing to show for it.

So, what to do?

Spinning, that's what. The knitting mojo may have gone, but the spinning version is back with a vengeance.
First up, my first ever laceweight:





It's a bit over-spun as I was originally going to ply it but then it became a game of "let's see how fine I can go with this and just how many yards I can make". The result is approx 200 yards of 25wpi yarn. The fibre was a free sample of Suffolk fleece, about 40 grams, kindly donated by Rachel in return for answering a few questions about the fibre and its results. Not bad, eh? I started to knit a lacy neck-warmer with it but couldn't get the stitch count to add up so it's been frogged, to await the return of (hopefully) inspiration.

Second was a little experiment that had been bubbling in the deepest recesses of what passes for my brain for quite a while. About 18 months ago I bought some extremely fine commercially-spun cashmere yarn, thinking that I would fashion all manner of wispy, floaty gorgeousness from it. Needless to say these plans did not come to fruition as the yarn was overspun, prone to breaking and, frankly, too much of a strain on my poor old eyes. I then hit on the idea of navajo-plying it so it would be a little thicker, a little more robust and therefore easier to knit with. There were several unsuccessful attempts at this that mainly resulted in howls of frustration and an almighty tangled mess needing to be surgically removed from the flyer on my wheel. This time though, the spinning godesses were smiling favourably in my direction and the navajo plying worked. Unfortunately, the resulting slightly-thicker-but-still-laceweight yarn was still unusable for knitting as it just didn't "gel" somehow. Next part of the experiment was to try plying it with some merino-blend singles that I had spun whilst at my parents' house the other weekend - this time, Houston, we have lift-off:



We have approx 350 yards of cashmere/merino/other wool yarn at about 15 wpi. Oh yeah ... the colour ... well, that was the other problem with the cashmere but that will have to wait till I get the new dyes I have ordered.

Lastly, Mollie would like you all to know that she has been "doing her bit" to aid me in my convalescence.


Why can't I just lie here all afternoon? What do you mean, there's a patient to be looked after?