It might be a small obsession...

Sunny Day Handspun

I swear I actually do have other things to talk about other than spinning. I have a pair of socks on the needles at the moment as well as a pair of silk fingerless mittens. You think that the allure of silk would help keep me away from the wheel.

It is just so relaxing to sit down and start spinning at a wheel. The activity is both productive and infinitely lazy. The feel of the wool slipping through your fingers and twisting into fine thread is highly rewarding because it is so magical. It is amazing how it holds together once you spread out a sheet of fiber so thin that it could fall apart, but before it does the twist shoots through the fiber and, suddenly, it is thread. When you think about it, there is no surprise that the ancient people made up myths and legends about spinning.

Purple Cabbage Handspun

I finished spinning, plying, and washing the pound of yellow roving that my parents got me for Christmas. It spun up to about a heavy worsted weight to a fingering weight, so it is slightly thick and thin. The skein at the front of the picture is slightly underplied while the skein in the back of the picture is slightly overplied, but that is just the learning curve of chain-plying using my wheel.They are also the biggest skeins that I have spun to date measuring in at about 100 yards per skein.

The little fiber batt that I got with my Golding is also spun up and plied. It has been done for a while now, but I didn't get around to washing it as quickly as I thought I would. The wheel played its part in distracting me. This skein is also chain-plied and is a nice fingering weight yarn. That means a two-ply with this spindle will be the perfect lace weight yarn that I am looking for.

Of course, my wheel only sat empty for about a day because I had misplaced my orifice hook. I had sat it down on my green armchair to get it out of the way when it fell off of my wheel and underneath a treadle when I was spinning. It turns out that the mahogany finish on the handle blended in perfectly with my fuzzy leopard print blanket on my chair and Sassy, a fat tabby cat, was sitting on it.

I am attempting to spin sock yarn out of the remaining Cherry Chocolate Chip batts that I got when I received my second spindle. I would like it to be a three-ply yarn, but I only have three bobbins. That means that I could either wind a plying ball to get the three-ply or I could do another chain-ply with one massive bobbin of singles.

The downside to the chain-ply is that the yarn will come out striping in some way again because the nature of the chain-plying tends to keep colors together. But the downside of winding a three-ply plying ball is to have an unequal amount of singles on any of the three bobbins and trying to deal with making a three-ply out of the leftovers or to chain-ply the leftovers anyway. That is the only reason why I haven't done a traditional three-ply yarn yet. I am not sure how to deal with the leftovers. So, I have to think about it and decide.