Bluegrass Weekend

I hadn't planned to spend the weekend with bluegrass pickers but I did and boy did I have a ball.  The Friday night concert was fabulous.  I love bluegrass music but I don't really know any of the bands or many of the players.  There are some that I knew about from living in Nashville but I know a few of the names now.  The band that knocked my socks off was Michael Cleveland and Flamekeeper.  I can still barely breathe thinking about them.  I also saw the mandolin of my dreams.  Natural wood, with rounded edges, beautiful tone.  Fortunately it was almost $300 so the temptation only went so far!

In fact the concerts were so exciting that I finished a pair of socks, one Friday night and one Saturday night.  Of course, the concerts went from about 7pm to after 11:30 and the pattern was plain Jane but I will still pretty amazed at how quickly they came off the needles.

This was wool yarn I'd bought at 365 Days on a Farm in IA over the summer.  I bought it particularly to make socks but I cast on about 4 times before I got something I liked.  (That was totally on me because the yarn is gorgeous and soft and wonderful.)  I'm afraid I can't remember the name of the yarn but I do know it's yarn made in the US because that's all 365 Days carries.  I knit them on size 2 needles and even though it really is a fingering/dk weight, it's so lightly spun that I could have used a size 1 needle and not worried.

I've even got a spinning project going.  This was 4 oz of blue-faced leicester fiber I bought at Bishophill particularly to spin for sock yarn but once I got the singles spun, I wasn't sure I wanted to lose my yardage.  The colors are so amazing that I really wished I had enough for a sweater.  Here's the bobbins of singles:

How beautiful is that?  But, as you can see, I decided to go for the 3-ply after all.  It will be very interesting to see how the various colors play together.  Of course, I could have kept the color bands but the changes would be too short and I didn't want to do a Navajo ply for the socks.  I wanted a true 3-ply and I think it's going to be very interesting.  The singles were spun with about an 8:1 ratio and I'm plying using the 12:1 ratio whorl to see if I can reproduce my recent experimentation results.  I'll let you know when I get this washed.