About finishing (or trying to finish)

It's been quite a wild week since I got back from vacation.  I mentioned before about the Sebu mittens.  Here's the finished pair.  Can you tell which one was the goof?

I haven't blocked them yet but I'm happy to have them finished.  They were ready just in time for 80 degree temps!

The other thing I was eager to finish was another version of the Berroco Cosima.  I do love my Berroco yarns.  But this time I wanted to spin a yarn comparable to the Berroco Cuzco the pattern calls for.  I have to admit my early efforts weren't completely sucessful.  Spinners always say it's harder to spin a chunkier yarn.  For some reason, the inclination is to spin an ever-thinner yarn.

Cuzco is 50/50 wool/alpaca so I had this big plan to get 8 oz of silver gray wool and 8 oz of silver gray alpaca, pull them into strips and spin them together.  Probably not the "right" way to do it but I did it that way on purpose.  I wanted to see what would happen.  I spun about 2/3 of the yarn and put it away because it wasn't being much fun to spin.  There it sat until I went on this vacation.  Since I didn't have anything else to be knitting on (mittens, notwithstanding), I decided to take this along and see how far my 2 skeins would take me.  The yarn wasn't perfect but it worked up fine and I was able to get the back, 1 front and part of the second front done.  And I still had at least 1 skein left to spin.

I came home and got spinning.  There's something to the thing about practice, because when I came back to this project I found that I was much better able to control the diameter and make the yarn look like what I wanted.  Here's what I mean:

The dark gray is the Berroco and the silver gray is mine.  Pretty darn close, don't you think?

I got this washed up and ready to go and started knitting.  The next challenge is a very small issue - having enough fiber to spin to make the yarn to knit the sweater.  Sigh... 

Almost but just not quite. 

Now I just have to wait for more Colonial wool to come in.  Guess I learned one lesson out of this:  it takes more than 1 lb of fiber to make a sweater!  Everyone's always asking me how much fiber it takes to make a sweater.  Now I know what to say - more than 1 lb!