Spin Happy

I continue to be thwarted in my knitting plans by my constant wrist/hand pain (yes, I am seeing a doctor.  Yes, I am taking medication.  Yes, I am wearing braces.), but I seem to be able to do a bit of spinning each night without suffering too much.  It's slow going, but I have been making a bit of progress, whereas the knitting has practically stalled.  In the two weeks since my return, I have accomplished roughly two hours of knitting, which continues to drive me crazy.  I have been self-medicating nightly with tea and chocolate to try to calm myself down, but did you guys know that knitting can't be replaced?  Not even by spinning or reading books about knitting or really reading any books at all.  My list of things I wish to knit gets longer and longer with each passing day as I continue to only be able to plan my projects and not execute them.  I feel like a masochist spending my free time on ravelry looking at projects or digging through my yarn stash looking at a world of possibility.  It's torture, I tell you!

But this post is for spinning, not knitting.  I wasn't able to bring my wonderful wheel with me to Minnesota for my Winter break, but during the last few days I spent in Pittsburgh in December I got back into spinning and was enjoying it immensely.

This summer, perhaps back in May or June, my friend sent me some fiber that she picked up at a Farmer's Market in Connecticut.  The fiber came from Sankow's Beaver Brook Farm and was a blend of natural-colored alpaca and lamb's wool.  It was wonderfully rustic and a joy to spin up.  The fiber was carded, not combed, so I turned my spinning time into a long-draw exercise.  The point was to create a lofty, airy yarn and for the most part I think I succeeded.

I really don't think I could be happier with this yarn.  It is the exact kind of yarn I love to work with and I am overjoyed that I was able to make it myself.  Typically the bobbins on my wheel can hold about 4oz. of fiber.  As you can see, however, I had to split this batch in half because the loft factor was so high that there was no way I could cram the whole shebang onto one bobbin.  I ended up with about 260 yards of a heavy worsted yarn and my mind is full of possibilities for what I can do with it.  (Thanks, Kate!)

Once I got that off the wheel (really, from start to finish, it only took about two days), I threw on a completely different spinning experience in the form of some superwash BFL from Anne at Wooly Wonka Fibers.  I didn't get a picture of the fiber before I started spinning, but it was in the "Wood Duck" colorway and, really, it was right up my alley.  I know I've made my love for birds quite apparent in the past, but you guys - BFL dyed in colors inspired by a bird, which I can then spin up and knit into something unique and wonderful?  I was over-the-top in love and I personally believe that my finished results do not disappoint.

I was actually quite shocked by how it turned out.  Not because I thought it would end up as a lumpy pile of crap, but because I was expecting something thicker with less yardage.  I'm not sure why I thought that's how it would be because I kept checking my singles by letting them twist up on themselves to see what the finished yarn would look like, but still... I was surprised.  What I have now is a 4oz. skein with 780 yards of light fingering-weight yarn.  And it's purty, too.

Overall it's pretty consistent, but clearly each of the plies has, well, character.  They play well together, though.

And lest you think that I have completely forgotten about the wonderful Cupcake batts that I was working on this summer, I have slowly been spinning my way through those as well.  (If by slowly you understand that I mean at a glacial pace.  Not even a fast glacier.  More like a glacier that goes nowhere for months at a time.)  I have spun up three of the six ounces now and have just begun working on the fourth.  I have been very tempted to ply the first three together first, but I can't allow myself to do that.  Instead I'm going to spin them all up, then ply 1, 3, 5 and 2, 4, 6 together (that makes sense in my head, does it make sense in yours, too?).  I think this will help keep things as consistent and mixed up as possible considering the fact that I have been spinning this fiber up over the course of months and months.

 

It's gonna be really nice, though.  I can tell.