Vibrant and shiny, it is
So, I’ve been spinning again lately and have some yarn to show off.
Here we have a 2-ply lace weight blue-faced leicester wool in the “As Above So Below” colourway from Crown Mountain Farms.
Tag: handspun
More Yarn!
Though it took a day later than I thought, I have pictures for you.
This one’s more accurate to the colour, though I used the magic of Photoshop to try and fix the other as well.
These skeins are the same size as the first batch. I have yet to measure and find out the yardage or weight of them though.
I made yarn!
I actually meant to post this before Reading Week, but in the midst of packing and such it just didn’t get done as planned. Anyway, I made yarn. In the last six weeks I’ve been taking a spinning class in order to improve my technique and to expand on what I’ve taught myself. The benefit to doing it is they let you borrow one of their wheels for the duration of the course. I don’t like this particular wheel much, but it has taught me what to look for and what to avoid in the one I get for myself.
So far I’ve made these:
The two on the outside are Crown Mountain Farms superwash roving in the Ain’t No Mountain High Enough colourway. It’s been two-plied into sock yarn. I really love this stuff. I finished some more sock yarn in Wild Thing over Reading Week and should have pictures of it later today. I also ordered a couple more colours that should arrive tomorrow.
The middle-right yarn was some roving we were given to mess with in class. I have no idea what it is. Wool, definitely, but beyond that I have no clue. It’s been navajo-plied, my first attempt, and that seemed to go really well. This yarn runs from lace-weight to worsted, since the green was an incredibly thin single, the white was slightly larger, and the blue was even thicker than that.
The middle-left yarn is a mixture of a whole bunch of fibres. We were learning to use hand carders and could pick from lots of stuff to blend. It has several different kinds of wool, mohair, and corn silk. Maybe some other things but those are what I remember.
The middle one was the first that I spun on the wheel. It’s wool again, but rather coarse. I brought it home with me and the cats confiscated it, so whether or not it gets found will dictate what it can be made into. My cats like eating things that resemble string.
Cat Hair Yarn
You might remember that in my last post I mentioned making my sister some yarn out of the cat hair she’d collected from brushing her cats. I thought we didn’t have any pictures of it, but when Dean started showing me the pictures taken last weekend there were quite a few that he’d taken of it. These are the two that I liked.
Most of this came from the same cat, though with 5 of them and a dog around I’m sure there are bits of all of them in it.
The star of today’s post: ROSS (and Stephanie’s legs)
First Attempts
I’ve been eager to learn to spin for a while now, but I didn’t know where to start. One day I got bored and starting looking for information on the internet, which lead to my buying a spindle and a bunch of roving to try. Unfortunately, it was taking a long time to arrive in the mail (and we know how impatient I get with the mail) so in a fit of desperation I made this:
My roving arrived that same day, so I decided to see if I could get the hang of spinning from the pictures and such that I’d seen. It was easy! My first single came out surprisingly thin, if a bit underspun in a few places.
Unfortunately, there was no way to wind on in order to spin some more, so I contented myself with the knowledge that I could do this and decided to wait another week for the spindle I ordered.
It finally arrived, and I went straight to work on my first yarn. The first skein is the sky blue that I ordered with the spindle, plied with some of the superwash merino that I had already received. I find the blue is harder to spin evenly, though the superwash is a dream to work with. That is why this skein is more even than the other even though I spun it first. The second skein is more of the blue, plied back onto itself.
I’m still practicing with the blue one, since the other I’d like to be able to spin consistently enough to make yarn for socks with. This is what I currently have:
