Keep Your Head Down

It's been a while since I posted. A couple of days ago I wrote a rather agonized post, none of it about knitting or spinning, and couldn't decide whether to publish it. Then, in the next day, almost everything I was writing about changed. So I deleted the draft, and here goes with what's still current.

The title is a request/admonishment to my unborn son. He's 32 weeks along now, and has been head-down at my last two checkups. Having had my first child by C-section because she was breech and couldn't be turned by any method known to humanity, I say, Hallelujah! And also, Ouch! I am ecstatically glad that this baby has a good chance of coming out in the time-honored way, 'cause C-section recovery is NO FUN, and early bonding where neither the child nor I is under the influence of narcotics is just sounding freaking beautiful. Sleeplessness, yes, most likely. Narcotics, not if I can help it.

The "Ouch" part is what it feels like to have a fetal head jammed into my pelvis a lot of the time. I know, it will get more intense before it gets easier. For now, it just seems like I'm getting more uncomfortable by the hour. But as some Buddhists say, pain is inevitable -- suffering is optional. I'll happily take the crushed bladder, sciatica, and so forth in exchange for a decent chance of getting this child born without surgery or drugs. Who me, suffer? No way! :)

And hey, I'm actually getting a little knitting done in the midst of all the spinning and childbirth-prep exercises. I have the belly and sleeves of the Shining Violet sweater done and ready to join to knit the raglan yoke. But today I needed some brainless knitting for church, so I swatched up some handspun for mittens. It was my first time trying to do anything with any of my handspun yarn besides look at it and pet it. Here's the swatch, on top of this week's childbirth reading:



The grayish stripe across the middle of the swatch is part of the charm of this yarn (she said, trying to get used to it herself). The brown in the yarn is from a Corriedale fleece that had many soft gray locks in it. I blended them in with the dark brown as I went, but not in all the rolags. That stripe is just a section of the brown singles with more gray than the rest. I'm planning to stripe this marled yarn with some pure-white handspun, so I expect (hope) those stripes will be the most visually striking element of the design.

Knitting with the yarn was nicer than I expected. The ply has only 8 or 9 bumps per inch, so I thought it might be pretty splitty, but the plies felted together just a tad in the final washing, so I'm having no such trouble. Also, it was a total thrill to be knitting with yarn that I've taken from raw, unwashed fleece to fixin'-to-be-mittens. It took some self-restraint not to tell everyone I saw about it. (I did tell a few!)