gifts, gifts and spinning

The christmas presents have been a success apart from one. Yes, you might have guessed it, the sweater for my older cousin is too small!(and she said it's scratchy, really kids these days etc...) But since she loved the scarf I'm not going to knit another scratchy sweater for her. But next time I decide to knit her something I'm going to measure her up. Kids are just too different to just pick a size according to age. She's not that tall, but rather roundish. Not fat at all, just the kind of roundishness common for kids.
What did I get for my brother in the end? A sweater. It was just too claustrophobic shopping a day before christmas eve that I decided against searching every shop for something.

I did get spoiled quite much this year too. Take a look:

There's:

~ 1kg of beautifull I guess you call it pencil roving(???)
~four Terry Pratchett books

~Spin to knit; which is a great book, but more later

~a wool winder; actually got that before christmas

~a cigarette etui from my mum cause it's pink, has bling-bling and "you have a very special place in my heart" written on it

~a brooch for the brooch-obsessed

~tons of choclate and other sweets; only one pictured here as example

mising in the pic:

~a little calendar from my brother which is pink too

~Gilmore Girls DVD second season

~an itunes card

I began flipping through the "Spin to knit" book on christmas eve before leaving for the concert and it's really well written. The first part tells you a lot about spinning, fiber etc and the second part are patterns. I haven't really read through the patterns yet, but the first part is nice.

Since I've been spinning quite much these past days I also had to ply some again. I had spun all of the blue-purple roving and after plying it had a bunch left over on one bobbin, so I spun up the red roving I brought from a fellow knit blogger and plyed them together. I rather like the effect.

And again I had left-overs, now from the red wool. I tried to Navajo ply it and it's ok, though not perfect either. It took some time to get a feeling about what exactly I should do in what order to get it to neatly ply and not produce wobbly yarn-though that would have made some nice designer yarn, if I were into that kind of yarn.

And this is the christmas roving spun. I like it, but it looks a lot different then the roving. The colors are less saturated and a bit greyish.

I guess this post is long enough already, so projects will be posted another time.