Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a great New Year's, now we all go crashing back into reality - unless you're a US Federal Employee and you get today off!

Before the end of last year, I got all the Beach singles plied and the yarn washed. I ended up with 1140 yards of probably DK weight, super fluffy yarn. I'm thrilled with the fluffy softness of this yarn, but there is a problem. When I bought this top I didn't really have any definite plans, I just like pale greens and blues. I had 12 ounces of it and if you remember, I spun it to give myself something with color and to work on getting fluffy yarn (I was coming off the Merino/Kid Mohair cabled white yarn when I started this). If you just consider those two things - color and fluff- I achieved my goal.

The problem? Well, when I demonstrated spinning to Caleb's Kindergarten class, this is what was on my wheel. One of the teachers asked what I was planning to do with this and I told her I had no definite plans for the finished yarn. Then she commented that it would make a lovely baby blanket. Now technically, she's right. Its the perfect color of aqua for those babies whose mothers "Don't Want To Know." You know these kids - they are the ones that wear aqua for the first 3 years of their lives because no one knew whether to buy pink or blue, tiaras or dumptrucks, so everyone bought aqua. Invariably, the little girls in aqua are all bald so their mothers are reduced to duct taping pink bows all over their heads so strangers don't complement them on their handsome baby boys. The boys in aqua have ridiculously long eyelashes, forcing their mothers to surround the baby in football paraphanalia to avoid the opposite problem. Either way, it would have been so much easier to just Find Out and then dress the child appropriately in the first place. (Please note Dear Reader, that I do not in any way refer to your own children, past, present, or future. I know that any of you who Didn't Want To Know, chose to wait because you wanted to be surprised and of course your baby was/is/will be such a paragon of feminity/pure definition of manliness that there is no doubt in any stranger's mind as to the sex of your blessed infant and you did not/are not/will not resort to such desparate measures as taping gender identification items to your infant.)

So now, every time I look at this yarn, I think "Baby of Undetermined Sex," even though this is not superwash wool, it would felt and only a truly sick person would gift a new mother with a handspun wool blanket that must be very delicately handwashed in order to keep it clean. (This yarn is way too thick to even enter into the shawl category and gifting a baby with an heirloom shawl to be used for a Christening and then later for the child's wedding is not evil. The heirloom baby shawl only sees the child at the actual event for a brief period of time before it is whisked away to safety until the child has grown and is hopefully not leaking strange fluids all the time anymore.) After all, when you give birth, you're lucky to get yourself washed let alone all the laundry the wee bundle of joy produces. (Someday I will devote an entire blog entry to "Diapers for Newborns: Evil Marketing Plot or Psychological Crutch for Sleep Deprived Parents?") So, since this will not be used for a baby or any baby associated activities, my problem is what to do with it. I've thought about over dying the whole shebang, probably a darker green, but I just don't know. I hate to over dye what someone else has dyed, it seems rude and disrespectful, but obviously my own neurosis are interfering with my enjoyment of this yarn. For now, I think I'll place it carefully into the yarn stash and let it age. Maybe I'll figure out what to do with it at some point. Or someone I really dislike will get pregnant and "Wait to Find Out." That would probably be the easiest thing to do.