Sometimes things just don't go as planned

One of the features of the last installment of this blog was a bobbin full of very fine singles, I'm not going to say laceweight - because I have no idea if the yarn is going to puff up into fatness after I set the twist. And I have no idea if the yarn will even stay dyed after I set the twist. My fingers were blue after todays spinning session - but in the interests of maybe keeping people entertained out there, I present two full bobbins. What's that? One of those bobbins looks erm, a bit more full than the other? Damn! I split the roving in half thinking that I would try to match the colour repeats in some sort of fashion. Any bets that it's going to match up nice and evenly out there? Darn - I thought not. Sigh, oh well - barberpoling can be a very nice effect as well. And I do have to say that this particular roving has very nice subtle colour striations... It will be interesting to say the least.

I'm planning on plying it up later on tonight, and seeing what I get. I've resigned myself to taking the last bit of the mondo full bobbin and trying to do the wrap it all over the house thing so that I can ply from both ends at the end. Should be a little bit of entertainment for the troops.

Speaking of barberpoling. I've also finished off this skein of yarn. You might remember it from a couple of posts ago. For this yarn that was the effect I was going for. I spun up half the roving just straight from the full thickness, giving me really long color repeats - then I took the other half of the roving and stripped it into 1/4ths lengthwise to give me shorter repeats - and (as we spinners do) plyed them together. I'm quite pleased with it, though I think it's a bit underplied, and so haven't soaked it yet. I'm contemplating running it back through my Skipper - but then again, have found that it doesn't make that much of a difference in the knitted up sample.

It's about 650 yards of Blue Faced Leicester. The first ply I spun with my regular inch worm technique, and the second ply I spun much more worsted. I have been really needing to practice my long draw more, and think I did a pretty good job. It's not as even as my inchworming - but it did go quite a lot faster, and also gives a nice effect to the final yarn - at least I think so. This will look much more interesting when I've actually balled it up into yarn cakey goodness.


Now I would like to present to you the very very first skein of yarn that I ever made. I'm so glad I kept it! Man is it fugly! What? You don't believe me? All yarn is good yarn - hmmmm - well, if you're particularly squeamish you might just want to look away now. Cuz it's ugly! When I showed it to the BBE he was taken aback. "Baby, this is bad! You plyed it? My spinning is better than this!" Were just a few of the comments heard from him. It was a half a fleece that I bought from P&M Woolcraft near Milton Keynes in England. I got the half of a fleece, a dog brush and a boat anchor bottom whorl Louet spindle. I was determined to learn to spin. I figured out pretty quickly that I could spin for longer if I stood on the coffee table and let it drop down. So you can just picture me standing on the coffee table, contorting and concentrating and dropping the damn spindle over and over again. It got even worse when I discovered that I could spin over the bannister at the top of the stairs. I don't even know how many times I dropped it, had to run down the stairs to retrieve the spindle, and hopefully not have dropped it on someone's head when they were trying to get up the stairs.

Progress has been made on the caramel swirl cardigan. I am almost done with the second sleeve, and get to do the fun part with figuring out the yoke soon. First I want to ply up the laceweight for my Wings o' the Moth shawl.

Also on the list for this weekend is finally blocking my Azalea shawl. We'll see how much I get done.

Weekends are just too short!

And now I leave you with a picture of my Saturday sky, taken just a few minutes ago.