Warning: Knitting content ahead

First, though, a baby update. Last Tuesday through Sunday--Sunday a week ago now--Iyyar slept, relatively, really well. (I won't get specific about what that means, because it's embarassing, but really well for him.) Monday night, it all went to gehennom, and nobody got any sleep all week. Friday night was better, and Saturday night he slept from 12 till almost 6 without nursing--by far his longest stretch ever. He did wake up, but his abba got him back to sleep without any of the good stuff. He's asleep now, and hopes around here are running high.

What does this have to do with knitting, you ask? Well, a sleeping baby can mean only one thing--knitting time! My friend and knitting buddy Cecilia came here last weekend, and the two of us wallowed in wool (and bagels, and Hungarian noodles) from Saturday night till she left Monday morning. She lives pretty far away, so we don't get to see each other very often and consider a visit an excuse for a lot of late-night knitting and carbohydrates. (I bought a five-pound bag of flour in anticipation of her visit. It ran out.)

If I had a functioning camera, I would show you glorious photographs of Barak's new spiral yoke sweater with Noro yoke, or the gloves I made my DSIL out of the loveliest yarn ever. I would show you pictures of the socks I made for the boys (two pairs out of a single ball of Regia!) and the Celtic Dreams top-down Aran that Sarah has nobly agreed to put sleeves on for me (it's been in a bag since January 1999). And I would definitely show you pictures of the sweater Cecilia made Barak, adorned with a picture of his favorite thing ever. And I would show you a picture of the basket of fish.

What's that, you say? Basket of fish? Well, it'll just have to wait till I find the charger for the camera battery.

In the meantime, with thoughts of aliya on our minds I have decided it is time to downsize my yarn cache. The trouble is, though, that almost everything I want to offload is handspun. Specifically, about ten pounds of naturally dyed, breed-specific wool, with only 100g of each breed/dyelot combination.

Maybe I should backtrack a little.

So, in the late 90s I was in grad school in England. I had just been through a spectacularly painful breakup with someone I had thought I'd marry (may I now say that I'm very pleased indeed that I didn't) and was living with a bunch of strangers in a terraced house in the West Midlands. What's a depressed post-breakup girl to do? Well, for the first semester I knitted. But then I discovered gan eden.

I quickly realized the purpose of my stay in the British Isles, and it wasn't more degrees. Clearly, it was sampling wool from every single breed of sheep to be found in England (I then expanded that to Scotland and Wales, just because).

There are forty million sheep in Great Britain. Just so you know. I don't remember how many breeds of sheep there are, but I could tell you by counting the number of skeins on my shelf. When I got back from England, Grandma E hosted a spin-in for me, and I brought my haul in a huge backpack. At some point during the proceedings, I emptied it out into a mountain on the floor. Nobody actually stopped spinning, but the conversation did have a noticeable lull.

That summer, I lived in Washington, DC. It was their hottest summer on record, and I didn't have air conditioning. What was the natural response to this? Why, buying an enormous natural dye sampler kit and dyeing the whole shebang, of course. (Oh, my roommate loved me, you can be sure of that. Especially when I started with the cochineal. "You're cooking your wool? In BUGS?!" We haven't kept in touch...)

So, where does this bring me? Now I have this yarn, which is very near and dear to my heart. It took a lot of time and effort to produce, and the materials weren't cheap either. But I've had it for, um, going on eight years now. I'm not going to knit it anytime soon, and I've carted it around enough. Clearly, it needs to go. But how do I put a price on this stuff? I've put some yarn on destash, to spectacular lack of success--such that I'm almost embarassed to try that again.

I'm inclined to put it all up there saying "Will swap for equal weight of interesting sock yarn" being that socks are all I want to knit these days anyway. Of course, first I'd have to find my camera...

Anybody out there interested? Will swap for interesting sock yarn. Any takers have to promise to love and cherish my handspun, and remember the immortal words of my favorite ever bumper sticker, courtesy of the British Wool Board:

Buy British Wool. Forty million sheep can't be wrong.