It suddenly occurred to me that I completely forgot to share pictures of the April Phat box I received! Shame on me. Here they are, for your viewing pleasure. These are the fibers.

I hadn’t been expecting to receive a contributor’s box, as I hadn’t sent in quite enough samples, but it came anyway, to my great delight!

I’ve already started spinning up quite a few of the samples on my drop spindle. (Which I recently went after with my stash of calligraphy pens and inks and decorated it to within an inch of its life.) My current idea is to spin them all up and possibly knit a tam from them and the yarn samples. The colors are fairly well matched. Lots of rainbow-y themes and blues and greens. Sounds like the recipe for a lovely tam to me!

Part of the fun of the Phat Fiber box is seeing what everyone comes up with for samples. I’ve been getting sneak previews of what June’s box is going to be (Science Fiction theme!) and I’d really, really like to be in on it. I’ve got ideas for three Jules Verne batts, and Wall-E sock yarns. Due to lack of time and funds, it’s looking like I might barely be able to squeak into the box with the Jules Verne, but as roving, not batts. We shall see.

The idea is that us yarn and fiber dealers send in samples of our work, and the samples are then combined in themed boxes for people to buy. Lovely stuff! I sent in some yarn for the July box, which has the theme of “Seaweed, Ships, and Scallywags.” I wasn’t able to send in quite enough samples to score my own box, but I fully intend to get one in August.

Here’s a little preview of the mini-skeins I sent in as samples. They’re tweedy fingering weights that will be appearing in my Etsy store soon. So cute!

Not to mention I’m suffering from a little beginning knitter’s naivety. On being told that my gauge was seven and a half stitches per inch instead of eight, I promptly thought I would have to knit more loosely. Because, as everyone knows, if you want seven and half to become eight, you have to add.

I’ll just leave that one alone for awhile.

And speaking of not boding well, I got smart and decided to sample a yarn. Remember the fall fleece/green silk blend I was going to do? Well, I tried a little piece to see how it looks.

Scratch That

I think it’ll wind up at about three ounces of fleece. If I like how it turns out in singles I can always dye more, then when I ply I’ll just trade out between balls. That way it won’t matter if my dye lot shifts a bit.