Dreams in Fiber: The Girl, Pumpkins, a Few Woolen Items, and a Gangster

It would appear that Charlotte (Aragog) has been bitten by the urge to do a little sprucing up in her tank. She has been rather active lately - usually in the evenings - adding a little silk here and a little silk there... I managed to take a few "action shots" the other night. Since it's evening and I had to use the flash to capture her through glass... well, bear with me.

She started off in one corner of her abode and if you look closely in this picture, you can see some of the silvery strands coming off her spinnerets. If you can't see them, this is what a tarantula bum looks like, though trust me, they're there.

She continued on, up and over one of her logs, and finally settled in on the other edge of her "silk mat". You can see some of the coconut substrate sticking to the strands on the last photo.

Fortunately (for me) you can't really see her silken mat or the strands that are found here and there as you gaze into her boudoir 'cause I'm not all that into the super webby tarantulas... Those are the arboreal variety where as Charlotte (Aragog) is the burrowing type. However, all spiders use silk to some degree so I just have to accept that it's there :)

Little man just thinks it is the coolest thing ever. He calls us all into his room so we can watch "the girl" as he fondly refers to her. It is rather cool, I'll give him that. Her spinnerets do this sort of swish-and-flick motion as she lays down the silk.

I managed to pry him away from "the girl" last night for a little pumpkin carving. As usual, both minions are excited to get started but somehow I am always the one left to gut all the pumpkins and do some of the carving. We picked out 4 pumpkins this year during the Farm Crawl but we only turned 3 of them into Jack-O-Lanterns. The minions decided that they wanted one to be left alone so we could put it on the steps as a decoration during Beggar's Night.

Speaking of Beggar's Night, it's tomorrow. Somehow October has slipped past my tired eyes and is almost done. Little man was going to dress up as the Headless Horseman again until he saw this costume in the costume shop and heard one of the patrons passing by refer to him as "a little Dillinger" and that's all it took; instant swagger. I don't think he even knew who Dillinger was, it was more that someone thought he looked cool.

I took these pictures last weekend right before I dropped little man off at the Halloween Party one of his classmates threw. I still need to get a picture of little miss' costume - she is designing it herself though we need to do a bit of tweaking because she has not yet taken into consideration the fact that the weather will be rather chilly and probably wet....

Good thing I made a few hats! Not that I got to keep either of them.

One of the teachers at the school found out that I knit and he immediately sought me out for a handknit hat. Evidently no one has ever made him anything so I agreed to make him an ISU beanie. He left everything up to me though he did tell me he wanted a pom pom so I went retro.

The other hat I made was a Thank You gift to the guy that gave me all the fleece earlier this year. I finally got it back from the mill. Some of it was made into roving and some I had blended and spun up into skeins - check them out :D

There are 3 worsted colors - natural, lighter gray, and a dark gray. The natural skeins are wool/alpaca/nylon, the lighter gray is wool/alpaca, and the dark gray is a slightly heavier skein consisting of 2 colors of wool, alpaca, and llama. I made the hat out of the darker gray.

I can't tell you how much I love working with natural wool. It is so different from the commercially spun skeins that I work with and dye. This hat is warm, too! I threw it on and made the hubby take a photo of it and when I took it off to show my neighbor I quickly realized just how much colder it was without it. I have plans to make one in my size ;)

The yarn is so natural and awesome that it still has a little bit of vm (veggie matter) in it!

Some of the yarn was spun into a fingering weight - 2ply. Here's a closer shot of it.

I have visions of lovely thick socks.....

The roving is pretty fun too; just a little thicker than a pencil roving. There are 3 colors/blends. The lightest gray is 100% wool, the other two grays are 50/50 - wool/black llama.