A good yarn

Yarny fibrous goodness in the mail today - not one but two packages. One contained some cheap Aran weight yarn - oiled pure wool at £2.99 a 100g ball from Texere in Bradford. It's not what anyone could call lovely but I quite like the colour - a kind of mink shade of brown with some flecks of white and colour in it. Being cheap yarn, I feel the need to swatch and a test square is in progress. All being well, I plan to do a knitted version of a fisherman's smock. It's the Warriston pattern by the wonderful, inspirational  Kate Davies. It's more or less a test knit as I really want to make a handspun version at some point.

In the other package was something much less boring and far more covetable, if not rather more expensive (especially as HM Customs & Excise got their finger in the pie). Early in January I had raided the Clearance Corner at Colorsong and this is the result: two colourful skeins of sock yarn, some merino/silk sliver to spin and some wonderful kid mohair sliver... to tax my spinning skills a little further than usual.

I'm hoping that the two spinning projects will make it onto the Show bench this year. I cannot possibly show the North Ron 3ply aran again - I've been spinning it for three years now! Perhaps I should get my skates on, finish the aran and get it ready for knitting up, and simply move on.

But why would I want to do that when that glorious golden mohair is sitting there, calling to me? and that's without mentioning the soft chant that I can detect going "red socks, red socks, RED socks!"