How The West Was Spun

Sammy

Somewhere in time's own space
There must be some sweet pastured place
Where creeks sing on and tall trees grow
Some paradise where horses go,
For by the love that guides my pen
I know great horses live again.
Stanley Harrison

A bright light went out of our lives Sunday night.  Sam was a great horse, a stalwart trail partner, and one of my best friends.  He will be missed.

Spinning Friday: Oceanwind Knits Batts

As promised, here are the spun-up batts.

These were a mix of various wools - some natural and some dyed.  I find that blends that have a bunch of different types of wool and staple lengths do best spun as woolen-y as you can, i.e. leaving a lot of air in them and not worrying too much about slubs or trying for a smooth, worsted style yarn.  (If you guessed this goes against my natural inclination for things, you'd be right!).

I had 3.5 oz of the batts, which I spun all onto one large bobbin, then wound off into a center pull ball and plyed back from that to make a 2-ply yarn.

I wound up with 145 yards of a heavy worsted/Aran weight yarn, which I think would be perfect for mittens.  It's not super soft, but not super scratchy - sort of somewhere in the middle and I think would be a nicely wearing yarn with a lot of warmth.

All for now...

WIP Wednesday: January 18, 2012

SPINNING PROJECTS

I finished up the batts I posted a picture of last Wednesday - those will be unveiled on Friday.  I dove back into the batts bin and selected 4 oz of BFL wool with sparkles blended in from Funky Carolina, in the "Pinko" colorway.

These two batts, while sold as a set, aren't actually matchy-matchy.  One has a lot more dark pink in it (the batt on the left) and one has more gray in it (the batt on the right).  Since each of the batts is 2 oz, I'm going to spin them individually and then ply them together, which I think will work nicely to blend the slightly differing colors.

KNITTING PROJECTS

• Still plugging along with the Vitamin D Cardi.  I did finish the fourth of the 5 increase sections to be done.  I will pick away at this more this week but I have another knitting project that I need to concentrate on, assuming the yarn arrives for it this week.
• Froggie:  Another set of foot/leg done and attached.  Might switch it up a bit and tackle the eyeballs this week.  :)

DESIGN PROJECTS

• I focused a lot this week on my Shakespeare socks and actually got these knitted up to the heel turn.  I'm going to forge along on these this week.
• A new Sekret Knitting Project that's on a bit of a deadline (actually due before the Shakespeare project, which is for April 1st).  Whenever my yarn arrives for that, I need to get cracking on it, but I'm going to try to alternate between these two projects so I can get both samples knit up.

All for now...

Good Reads

Long-time blog reader, Dawn (who happens to be responsible for my uber awesome banner for the blog too), pointed me towards the Good Reads site with my last book review post last week.

I was unsure about adding in yet another site to bother with, but I actually am pretty impressed with the organization of the site, and the ability to get some good recommendations.

I think I have found a few of you already, but if you are a Good Reads member and wouldn't mind, will you let me know if I could add you as a friend (or shoot me a note in the comments and I'll be glad to reply with the email I've used to set my account up) if you think we'd like the same sort of books?

Now... I just have to get my dad hooked on this site and I will be set!  He's such a voracious reader, I could only read a tenth of what he reads in a month and still be kept plenty busy.

All for now.....

Spinning Friday: A Two-Fer!

I have two new finished spins to share with y'all this week.

First up is a set of batts.  These were from Desert Garden Farm, and were part of a LOTR offering.  The colorway is "elf".  It's a blend of dark gray longwool (Lincoln??) plus a softer wool like merino, although probably more likely Polwarth (??) dyed light gray, with gold glitz.

I spun these up trying to keep them fairly woolen-y since I didn't want the longwool to get overspun and harsh.  I had 4 oz of batts, and wound up with a nice 2-ply worsted weight yarn with 202 yards in the skein.

Next up was the 50/50 merino/soy roving I showed you in last week's WIP post.  The original roving was from my shop fiber club in 2011, and the colorway was "Fathom".  I did some judicious pre-drafting of this, as the soy wasn't evenly distributed through the roving and I wanted it less clumped.  I then spun it from one end to the other, and came out the far end with 4 oz of singles (for the first of the 12 in 12 challenges) with 428 yards of fingering weight yarn.

My plan is to use this for the pretty ruffled scarf from the Jane Austen Knits 2011 magazine, which was also knit from a handspun singles.

All for now.....