Pain in the Butt Yarn

I like to experiment with new skills, in spinning as in life.  This trait caused me to try spinning with a woolen/long draw from pseudo rolags.  I had seen several descriptions, on the cover of Spin Off magazine and at my friend Brandi's blog.  I took apart my niddy noddy and used the center dowel to roll up literally hundreds of rolags assembly line style with an efficiency that would have made old man Ford jealous. 

Then I started to spin.  I got the hang of the long draw after watching some youtube videos and lots of practice.  I am used to the short draw with small hand movements and this method made my arm hurt.  I am also used to changing to a different project after a week or so, but I had two massive bags of fiber to get through and fatigue set in.  When I realized I was no longer having fun, I declared it time to ply and move on.  This is 430 yards of a rather chunky 2 ply yarn (at least Aran, probably bigger) spun from wool/alpaca mill ends from Brown Sheep.  The woolen draw definitely lowered the grist and produced a softer, fluffier product, but I'm going back to worsted/short draw.

Chocolate Covered Cherry

This skein I'm calling chocolate covered cherry.  It's 350 yards of a red merino wool single plied with brown #10 crochet cotton.  I would call it DK weight, but again I can't be bothered with wpi.  I pre-strung red beads on the cotton strand and slid one up to get tangled in place at semi-random intervals.  The key takeaway from my experience on this one was to re wind the cotton thread on a bobbin before plying instead of working off the spool.  It was a pain in the arse trying to yank off lengths while the spool flailed wildly about.

Stockpile

With the wheel I'm spinning way faster than I can comfortably blog, so my stockpile of projects to share is building up.  Today's skein is superwash wool spun from part of a grab bag of brown sheep mill end roving I bought at DBNY.  There's 240 yards of worsted-ish blueness.  (I still haven't bothered with wpi...) It was my second attempt at navajo plying and produced a near commercial quality yarn... now if only any of these babies I need to knit for were boys!

March Madness

I spun up some scarlet and gray buckeye yarn for good luck in the NCAA tournament! O-H-I-O!

First Skein!

This is the first skein from my Ashford Joy.  It's a 70% merino, 30% silk blend roving from KnitPicks that I dyed.  (see earlier posts...)  It's 300 yards of fingering weight yarn.  WPI - meh, I haven't gotten that far.

By the way...

As I knit forward on other projects and begin to hoard indecent amounts of roving, I really should make an effort to post everything else.  This is how my "snowy pastures" hand spun knit up in cowl form.  I tried a few different stitch patterns, but the end result looked like yarn gak.  I settled on the plain stockinette to best showcase to yarn.

The Spinster Chronicles

Yes my friends, I am now officially a spinster.  (and I'm loving every minute of it!)  Santa Claus brought me a learn to spin kit from KnitPicks with a convertible Turkish drop spindle and 100 grams of Peruvian wool roving.  It took a while to figure out what I was doing, and I made lots of noob errors, but the yarn I produced makes me so happy.

It's definitely not a consistent weight throughout, but thick and thin art yarn is totally in vogue nowadays.  (I think.)  I predrafted the roving for the singles and then plied it with a lace-weight wool/mohair blend in green.  I'm calling it "snowy pastures".  There are about 85 yards and I haven't decided what to knit with it yet.  Have another look with fingers for scale.