Happy Holidays!

The kids and I are in Idaho, and my parents' house, as is my sister. It's darn cold here--around 20 degrees F at the moment--with lots of snow. The kids are loving it! (The pic above is my parents' British phone booth that they brought back when they moved back from England.)

The day before yesterday Gilly made a snowman:


and Ryan had a good time investigating the tree:



Yesterday was the Great Dyeing of 2010. Last year Karen and my Mom helped me dye the roving that I spun into yarn for my Bono Kimono (which just needs to be blocked and then seamed), so this year I told them I'd help *them* dye.

We dyed six pounds of roving.

The four braids on the left are my Mom's Polworth roving, and the three on the right are some of Karen's Polworth.


The pink/orange/purple on the left are Karen's merino/mohair roving, and the ones on the right are the rest of the batch of Karen's from the pic above.

Here are the rovings before we braided them:

And another gratuitous shot on the drying rack:

We've been busy indeed! :-)

ETA: I've gotten a couple of questions about what rovings are. They're basically long lengths of fiber that's been cleaned and the fibers have been aligned so that they're (mostly) going in the same direction. The proper name is actually "top" but "roving" is a more commonly-used term (although it's not correct--"roving" has the fibers *not* aligned). Here's a good explanation.