Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Remiss

I've been spinning a lot more than knitting lately, because it is a soothing repetitive low-impact relaxing activity (and at the end I get yarn). So I don't have a lot of knitting to show off, but I do have some spinning:

merino laceweight

This used to be a 50g merino sliver from Fleece Artist. (Am I the only person who's never even seen a Fleece Artist tag with a colourway name on it?) It's about 350m, so not inadmissably dense or anything, and I'm pleased with it. When it's wound into a cake like this I think it looks like something from a child's drawing, or a satellite weather-map rendering of a storm. I have no idea what to do with yarn in these colours, though.

handspun beret

This started life as Shetland from Spunky Eclectic ("Pluto" colourway). I spun it into a sportweight or so, and it is very crisp and perfect for a pattern full of ribbing like this one ("Porom" by Jared Flood). I modified the pattern by adding an extra few ribs, to compensate for my smaller gauge, and it fits perfectly. I'm thrilled with how the yarn turned out, too; the stripes are just subtle enough for my taste.

fingering shetland

This is a bigger project: I have 400g of Shetland roving from a local farm (by way of Wool Revival), and my goal is to spin it into a sweater amount of yarn. So far I've got two 50g skeins of 200m each (well, one is 202m, the other 204), so if I stay consistent that means I should have about 1600m at the end? Which is definitely a sweater amount. I'd never spun proper roving before, and it was a revelation. The yarn is lightweight and squishy and soft, and completely effortless to spin.

What really motivated this post was a box I got from Crown Mountain today, containing these excellent things:

shetland rainbow

a Shetland rainbow, and

corriedale pencil roving

Corriedale pencil roving.

I have a lot of homework still to do before the end of the semester (in eight days!), so I'm going to use this stuff as a reward—I'm not allowed to spin it in earnest until I'm finished school.

1 comment:

MoniqueB. said...

A lot of people are combining the spinning with the knitting. I think it's a good combo. Especially because you can spin what ever you want, thickness, colour, qualities, twined..
I can't and I won't spin.
I do like to see all the roving and the results.