You spin me right round Inferno Monster!

Between Defensive Driving and a Bachelorette party, I got in a ridiculous amount of spinning.

Before I talk about Inferno Monster, I need to dish about the driving course and the party.

$50 an hour.
My eyes teared up and my stomach dropped when I bought my first 6 months of car insurance. I was so excited to learn it was JUST $500 but I didn’t fully understand, that was for a 6 months policy. I had a swift learning curve. It does seem a tad goofy that at 35, this is the first time I’ve bought car insurance, but until 2 years ago, I lived in great cities with great public transportation rendering a car, not only not smart, but completely foolish. I’ve never been a big car person, never really felt that apparently All-America desire to drive whopping gas guzzling vehicles. Then I moved here, the Ex bought me a car (which will shortly be nicknamed POC short for “piece-o-crap”) and I had to buy insurance. Once I figured out how it all works, the buying of the insurance wasn’t a problem. Watching $500+ leave my account was painful however, especially when you consider that in a blink of 6 months, I’ll have to pay that all over again. And basically the only way to lower your insurance is to take a defensive driving class. Now I have heard people lament about the horrors of sitting in a room for 6 hours listening to some guy wax pathetic on the rules of the road, but honestly, 6 hours of my life is totally worth expending in the strenuous activity of sitting in a chair knowing that I’ll get to keep about 100 smackers in my wallet. Nice ROI there don’t ya think?

Bachelorette Parties
I’ve never been to one before. This was an event for a co-worker. I wouldn’t consider us “friends” but we are certainly “friendly” and I was glad to go. There is an odd tradition in these parts that Bachelor/Stag/Bachelorette parties are paid events, meaning that you, as the guest, buy a ticket and pay for the privilege of drinking with the future Bride or Groom and stand witness as their ‘singleton’ days fade into the sunset. This is how most couples raise money for the wedding I’m told. How odd is that? So in essence, it’s like paying to go to the wedding. Very strange. I had a good time regardless and rediscovered my love for Stoli. No, there were wild tales to tell for the nights proceedings, although I did find myself in the peculiar position of molding penises from purple playdo with my co-workers (silly games are apparently required at such events). That was fairly uncomfortable (more for them, less for me).

Back to the spinning!

I’ve mentioned my 3-part-plan to spin Inferno. I started off like gang busters and got the first part done. I divided up the roving into three separate colors and spun each color separately. It was much harder than I anticipated to separate the fiber. And no, I am not quite that anal enough to sit there with tweezers and pull out each fiber individually. I wound up with bunches of little wisps of roving that had two colors in it. So I decided to spin these bits at the beginning and the ending of each of the solid color batch. This fiber was a tad more difficult to work with than other stuff I’ve been using. It’s VERY soft, VERY poofy, VERY silky, and will start to felt just from the pressure of my fingers and the moisture off my palms. This is not a “gnash-teeth-rend-garments” type of problem, but does lead to slubs and mild irritation (that’s mental irritation, not physical). I’ve adjusted the way I hold the fiber a bit to help with this problem. The end yarn doesn’t suffer that much because of it. OH, also, this stuff breaks like mad. I’ll be spinning happily, la la la, twirl draft twirl draft twirl CLUNK - the single will breaks and the spindle will crash to the ground. Clunk. I think I’m going to need a new spindle soon, as this one has bellyflopped quite a bit. This stuff is so poofy that I’ve had to add a lot of twist to it of it just breaks for the weight of the spindle. But I did get to ply it all.
And I’m happy to report that the yarn is delightfully soft and fuzzy. I’ll have to let Claire give it the nuzzle test. But it seems quite nice. I can’t wait to knit with it, but wait I must! I need to find a pattern that I can show off the three different patterned yarns. Well, I HOPE I’ll have three different patterned yarns.

I’m not too sure how this will all work out yet.