knitting with roving

Well, today's my last day of the Independence holiday. As usual, I've been drop-kicked by a bug too small to see. A head cold. Luckily, today is the first day in a week that I've felt half-decent. I've had WAAAY to much caffeine and have too much energy for my own good. I've had a ton of projects bouncing around in my head, but so far, all I've managed to do is get groceries, get some laundry washing, and take the latest spinning project down from the drying rack and bag it up.

So I have some really gorgeous wool roving - mermaidy colors in blues and greens and purples - that I've been working with. There's a LOT of it and I'm kind of spun out on it for the time being. And I've been, of course, reading a lot on Ravelry and getting a hankering to felt something. I want to make a bag with this roving, but I'm so sick of spinning it that I've decided to go with just knitting the roving. I've pulled some down to pencil roving size, more or less, and begun to knit it on US size 11 straight needles. They're the biggest needles I've got for now. It's going surprizingly well! I had some misgivings about it at first, envisioning the roving falling apart, but this fiber still has a little sheep grease in it, I think, and it's kind of sticky. That makes it a little hard to spin, but it's making it fabulous to knit with! So far, no falling apart, and when I was pulling it into smaller sections, if it broke, I just rolled it between my hands a couple of times and PRESTO! it's whole roving again!

The only drawback to this whole process is that there's no hot water plumbed into the laundry room. I'll have to heat water in the teapot to carry to the washer for my felting process. Plus the fact that every time I pull it into pencil roving, I want to grab a spindle! This fiber is just beautiful! I'll have pictures of this experiment later. Right now, I've gotta get my overly-caffinated brain back down to the ground!