I’m a Spinning Fool…
It is once again Tuesday. Seeing as how I’ve been on more of spinning kick than a knitting kick lately I’ve got a fair bit to share today. Above is the completed yarn from this past week. On the left is some gorgeous (if I do say so myself, though the SnB gals backed me up on that assessment last night) silk/merino (70/30) blend fiber from Lambspun. It’s somewhere between fingering and sport weight and totals ~175 yds. I think it will become a skinny lace scarf of some variety to dress up my habit of wearing all brown or all black in the cold season. Plus, the color makes my somewhat changeable eyes tend more towards the blue spectrum than the dull grey they usually are.
The other picture is about 110 yds of a thick thin single from two batts Amanda, Snow, and I created way back when. I have to say we did a crap job on those. When I went to split the batt I noticed it wasn’t at all uniform and that there were quite a bit of neps in it as well. So, I decided to not fight it and hence went with the thick thin and somewhat slubby yarn. I actually like it quite a lot. But I wasn’t a fan of the electric purple. The original locks were bright purple and a nearly electric blue. So, after blocking I sprinkled a pack of cherry and a pack of black cherry kook aid on it randomly and wrapped it in saran and did the microwave process just before bed (three runs of 2 minutes on and 2 minutes off) and then let it sit overnight. This was the result. I could have gone for more of the kool-aid. But, I think I’ll probably knit this up into a hat for charity for a child so it’ll probably be just perfect. Snow will have to refresh my memory on what type of wool this was. I’m thinking Lincoln, but I’m not positive. This is the first that I’ve purposfully set out to create a singles yarn since I really *learned* to spin properly. It was amazing to compare it preblock and post block! What a difference washing and setting the twist makes!
And, despite my worries of putting off the spinning of the dark red alpaca roving, I got on that this week as well and this one was much, much cleaner than the light package. I just got it plied this morning…
That is both colors (the lighter I spoke of last week) pre-blocking and blocking. The dark is actually less than the stated 2 oz and is only about 75 yds, whereas the light was 2.5 oz and ~102 yds. The yarns match pretty well though. In the blocking picture you can see I hang my yarn by the fireplace :-) We have all those nails in the mantlepiece that we inherited when we bought the house so it seemed like as good a spot as any (especially since people in this house are known to turn on the shower without being awake and thus forget to remove items that are drying over the tub and they get wet and the process has to start all over again, LOL). The only problem was the small diameter of the nail didn’t seem like it could be good for the yarn, so I slip a PVC pipe connector over the nails in order to be gentler on the yarn. I try to rotate it around every couple of hours as well, otherwise the yarn stays kind of wet at the top and bottom where the pressure is.
Now, to design a two color hat. I’ve contemplated the two color brioche stitch but I could also do a diagonal stripe on it or perhaps a simple fair isle design? I’m open to suggestions if anyone has any. I really need to turn my attention to other holiday knitting/felting instead seeing as how this hat and the mohair scarf can easily be pushed off to late January without penalty or guilt.
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