Yaaaaarn!

Awhile back, last month, there was a sneak peek of what's on the wheel. Well, guess what? It's off the wheel, plied, washed, and done!

I'm really pleased. It's 430 yards of 2-ply that ranges from sport to worsted - 10 to 18 wraps per inch, depending on the stretch of yarn. I use Eucalan no-rinse wool wash in a hot bath and let it dry. It came out soft and wound up two large cake balls.

Reds, purples, oranges, yellows. It's in a box and shipping to my dragon now, who will knit it into a slouchy hat for the cat!mom. I can't wait to see what it looks like!

Wheel in Color

Back in last christmas I bought myself my very first spinning wheel - an Ashford Kiwi 2, unfinished (no stain, no polish). I've been happily spinning on this wheel half a year now, with vague plans to put some stain and polish on it at some point to protect it.

This is my wheel as of Sunday morning. I realized it was getting a bit grubby - those are foot prints from treadling with bare feet on the pedals, and the bobbin brake knob is turning greyish from hand oils where I'm always turning it. Poor wheel is only half a year old! Time to do something about coating it, but I really really don't have the space or patience to disassemble the entire thing, stain it, and leave it somewhere to dry - not to mention it's now stupidly humid out and putting it outside isn't going to actually make it dry.

Two hours later, here's the first in-progress wheel photo. I'm using outdoor furniture acrylic paint - goes on like melted butter with a little water mixed in, very opaque, dries in a flash. The brake knob, center strut, and pedal concords are done in fire engine red; the pedals are done in red with diluted streaks of metallic gold over the top. The idea for the scheme is going to be red/gold/black.

And no, I'm not taking it apart. =P I probably won't paint ALL of it, just the parts I come in contact with the most often (and the wheel itself, because it'll be pretty). And because acrylic dries so fast, I can go back to spinning within an hour or two of putting a coat of paint on. Yay! \o/

What's on the Wheel

Haven't been spinning much lately, too many other things to do. However, I banged up my right shoulder, which put a stop to things like knitting and beading. Spinning, however, doesn't take much shoulder motion, and my chair is nice and high backed so I could brace myself. Back to spinning it is!

This is what's on the wheel right now. I wish I could tell you what it is, but honestly, I have no clue. The Cat Mom, on hearing her kitten had taken up spinning, sent me a Box 'o Roving - no labels, no clue what fibers they are, just random colors Mom liked. Some of them were rough, at least two were completely unspinnable (I suspect they were for felting) and some of them were soft and fluffy and wonderful. 

So I arranged them in orders where the colors looked nice together, and started spinning!

It's - mostly - a nice thin single. And I've spun enough of it that at this point the bobbin is so heavy that my little Ashford Kiwi doesn't really want to take up the yarn right any more. The plan is that my Dragon will knit the Cat Mom a hat out of it, and for a hat you need yardage, so the colorful mix needs to be plied with something else and not to itself.

It's all so colorful and bright I decided it needed something darker and sort of neutral to offset it. Digging in the roving stash, I came up with BlueMoonFiberArts Blackbird colorway, in superwash merino. 

 

Which looks much lighter than you'd expect as roving, but spins up beautifully dark with just some subdued hints of color. I'm hoping it'll ply with the colorful scraps and make them pop.

Now to spin a comparable amount of the Blackbird to go with the Random Roving! I have no real way to judge this except by guesstimating. I'm excited to see what it plies like, and how much yarn I end up with by the end of it.

Scrap Yarn Sweater Dress

What do you do with your beginner sample works? You know the things I mean - the lumpy swatches of awkward knitting or the even lumpier over and under twisted chunky bits of homespun yarn, the mangled bits of jewelry wire, and the tensionless bits of weaving. All the things that scream "Hello! I just started this craft and I'm not sure what I'm doing and I'm making a lot of mistakes!" Yeah, those bits.

Trash bin? Usually. But in the case of spinning, well, I'm loathe to discard any actually useable bits of yarn. Even if it's overspun chunky.

Fortunately, there's always uses for scrap yarn. Even better, dolls will never complain that you've dressed them in something that looks like your first knitting project! Particularly not when the doll in question has been sitting around naked for months because nothing I have in doll clothes will fit over her abundance of curves.

Shadow: Finally, clothes!

Shadow again, my Iplehouse EID 1/3 girl, and the scrap yarn sweater dress made entirely of bits and bobs handspun from roving by yours truly. At the top there's what I call "Alliance Boyfriend" (being a handful from my "Heroes of the Alliance" roving bag mixed with a handful from my "Boyfriend Sweater" roving bag). Around her waist is some "Alchemy Flambeau", and the skirt part is "Optimus Prime". Optimus and Alliance Boyfriend were spun around the same time when I first got my spinning wheel, with Flambeau coming several months later when I had learned some better technique.

Alliance Boyfriend - merino/silk/bamboo

Here's "Alliance Boyfriend". It's made of rovings from Paradise Fibers - Ashland Bay Merino/Silk in "Autumn" and Ashland Bay Bamboo in "Aegean Blue". It's a chunky worsted weight, 2ply, about 16 yards.

Alchemy Flambeau - polworth/BFL

Swatched on US3

This is "Alchemy Flambeau". Still a bit on the thick and thin side, but look at the weight difference! 2ply sock yarn. The roving is a mix from BlueMoon Fiber Arts - a handful of the "Flambeau" in Polworth (the grayish side) and "Tea and Alchemy" in Bluefaced Leicester (the reddish side).

Optimus Prime - silk

OP again

Lastly, there's "Optimus Prime", which was the first thing I spun on my wheel. It's pure silk mawatas, Knit Picks Hanks in the Hood in "Warm Spring". I peeled each layer apart and spun them together with the colored ends butted up against each other (blue to blue, red to red) so that the color gradations were longer, and then I plied it to itself into a 2ply chunky worsted. Having tried several cheaper silk hankies from other places, I definitely recommend trying Hanks in the Hood - the brilliant color and smoothness is to die for. Excellent quality, and at that chunky weight I got 26 yards from it.

Cast on and free form knit with US8 needles, and viola! Something useful out of My First Spun scrap yarn.

Tiny Balls of Yarn

So last time I raved about the itty bitty mini Turkish drop spindle. The real question is, of course, how much yarn can such an itty bitty spindle make? And what do you DO with it?

This is the ball I pulled off of the spindle - I could have kept spinning, but I was curious how much I already had. It was probably roughly the size of a dollar (US) coin. No bigger than a cat toy.

Since it was a center pull ball, done in a few different stretches of roving, I took the center and the end of the yarn and tied them back on the spindle, then plied the single of yarn to itself. This gave me a tiny ball of roughly sock weight yarn and I thought to myself, well, why not knit something for one of the dolls?

This is Shadow. She's an Iplehouse EID 1/3 girl, Asa sculpt, and currently sans faceup/eyes/wig in prep for doing some major mods to her, so please excuse the bare bones look! I cast on enough stitches to go around my smallest circular needle and then just did four rows of random yo/k2tog lace to make a little cowl scarf. I actually could have done another round or two - I had yarn left over.

So, THAT's what you can do with a itty bitty ball of yarn. I'm suitably impressed with the mini spindle, and hey, now Shadow has a totally hand made, handspun and knit, cowl scarf! ^_^

Tiniest Spindle

I wasn't going to be one of those people enamored of drop spindles. I like my wheel! It does a lot of yarn quickly and far more consistently than I can do by hand. But... I'm a sucker for tiny things. >_>

How tiny, you ask?

This is a mini Turkish spindle from Snyder Spindes on Etsy. It's a whopping 4.25" long, with 2.5" arms, and like all Turkish spindles it winds a center pull ball around the arms and comes apart in pieces so you can just slide the ball free. I LOVE IT. It's so very tiny! I can put it in my pocket, carry around a sandwich bag of roving, and spin on the bus!

Isn't it ADORABLE?? And it has an excellent spin for making very thin lightweight singles.

The bits of roving you're seeing on it are:
1) A 50/50 merino-bamboo mix (the purple-ish blue) from Opalessence Fiber Studio on Etsy
2) Some 100% tencel (the white) from Dyingforcolor on Etsy.

Merino-Bamboo

Tencel

The merino-bamboo spins up like a dream, nice and easy to get consistent and thin. The tencel is a lot slipperier and hence harder to get consistent - also, it's fuzzy. VERY fuzzy. I end up with puff clouds of it stuck to my hands, my clothes, and sort of free floating around me if I handle it for too long. I can see why people mix the tencel with other things, but I haven't mastered blended combing yet.

Bunnies!

Of all the things I never thought I'd spin, Angora bunny fur has to be on the top of the list. But when my mom found out I had an interest in spinning she sent me a box of Random Rovings - things she'd gotten from a local seller in Pueblo and which came to me completely unlabeled, a sampler box in warm colors. Some of them were only good for felting, some of them I've spun into a multicolored yarn which my mom will get back in the form of a hat, and at the bottom of the little box was... a ziplock bag of pure satin fluff. Angora fluff. Fluffy, slippery, undyed, soft as clouds bunny fur.

There is NO WAY I could spin that on my wheel. I have enough problems with bamboo and silk as it is! But, I have a drop spindle, which I've actually never ever used. And a bag of bunny fur that was staring at me longingly. Well, I thought, why not? What's the worst that could happen?

Color me pleasantly surprised!

Compared to spinning on a wheel I find drop spindles incredibly slow and tedious. But it does give you MUCH better control, and though my spinning is on the thick/thin side with lumps and bobbles, it's still pretty much on the lace side of a single of angora. Success!

Obviously I still have a lot to spin, but it's getting easier (pre-drafting is key!) I have two blue and green silk mawatas to spin as well - maybe I'll do them all on the drop spindle and then ply the silk and angora together for something super soft. No idea what I'd do with it... maybe just wind it up and pet it occasionally. ^_^