Spinning up a storm

I love a long weekend. It's nice if going out of town is possible but sometimes even nicer just to stay home. My super-fun good friday activity was spinning. I haven't spun for quite a while and really felt like picking up the spindle again. In one day I spun up and plied 6 oz. of yarn. That's definitely a record for me.

I started by finishing up the spinning of some Pandamint BFL leftover from my Pamplemousse en caoutchouc days. I spun and plied the first half of this bump last fall and even started knitting a beret with it. I wasn't loving how the hat was coming along so the motivation to finish spinning it quickly left. But since I have just the one spindle and I had a hankering to spin, this is where I got started.

The nice thing about going back to fibre already half spun is that I had already divided the roving into smaller strips and arranged them in an order to keep the colour changed balanced along the skein (as opposed to spinning one half, then the other and ending up with two related colourways. Plus my spindle was already half loaded with singles so I was finished this yarn in no time!

Next, I moved onto some roving I bought from A verb for keeping warm, starting with some very lovely purple named Glenda with Crocodile Tears as a chaser. Both of these were quite densely packed so needed quite a bit of teasing and drafting.

The colours are great, but I found my hands getting slightly green when spinning up the Crocodile Tears. And the purple bled a bit while finishing the yarn, making the Pandamint ever so slightly tinted. I was also kind of put off that these both were only 2 oz. but I understand why. Natural dyes take alot more dye than synthetic reactive dyes, raising the price per unit of fibre and one way to keep prices more reasonable is having smaller bumps.

I kind of wish that I had chain plied Glenda rather than making it a 2 ply. The lighter parts of the roving kind of disappeared into a medium purple yarn.


But I was pretty sold on the idea of making a 2-ply of the Crocodile Tears until I saw how the singles were spinning up.

So last minute chang-o to a chain plied yarn.

I'm very happy with how it turned out. Subtle colour changes intact.

So one day. 3 skeins of yarn. 6 oz. of entertainment.

Oh and my ladybug is making her way as we speak. In celebration of making the leap to a wheel, I decided to spin up all the fibre I have. Don't worry though. I've signed up for a couple of fibre clubs to go with it.