Spinning Extravaganza!

Once again, I have been negligent of the blog. Not to make excuses, but I really think Ravelry is to blame. Several times, I'll come sit down at my computer to do some blog-like things and go over to see what's happening on Ravlery and I get sucked in. It's like a big black hole of knitting bliss. But now that I've sat down, I'm not to going to go look at Ravelry until I've finished this post. Nope. I'm not going to do it....I'm going to stay focused.

So, back to spinning...

Remember this?















This was my first attempt at my self-taught spinning. I made a drop spindle from directions online and tired (unsuccessfully) to spin dryer lint. I gave up with dryer lint and moved on to cotton balls. Cotton balls are much easier to spin than dryer lint. It was slow and tedious, but I thought that was because I was a newbie. That was until a very generous local raveler saw I was learning to spin and gave me a bag of corridale. Oh, friends....that changed everything. Soon I had this:
the wool was flying (relative to cotton balls, that is) and I was enjoying spinning SO much more than those blasted cotton balls. So I unwound the wool to get the cotton off the spindle (it was living under the wool) and made this:



with this:


A wee little baby skein of cotton yarn plied with my new, funky zebra striped drop spindle. The Zebra spindle is way better than the first one and is much more fun to use. It was also really fun to make, so the next thing you know, I ended up with this:

(a black and red kanji spindle with the Japanese symbols for Wool, Sheep, Yarn and Spin/Make Yarn around the outside)

AND

(A purple drop spindle with sparkles. This one has a thicker shaft and a hook, too)

And then I ended up with an Etsy shop.

It just kind of happened. So if you dig my drop spindles, please come check them out....


Anyway, back to the wool. I spun until my spindle was full and then plied the yarn using the purple spindle and whala! Yarn!


It's about 16 WPI, which this tells me is fingering weight, however, there are some parts that look a little bigger, like almost worsted size, so I think I'll call it DK, which is a nice middle ground. The scale at the post office says it's 1.3 oz. so I think that will be enough to make some mary jane-type socks with. I guess we'll find out!

Also in the spinning department, I'm a winner! I won one of the contests I told you about in the previous post, so Trampled by Geese sent me a fun little soy blend fiber sample:

They are small amounts of fiber, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet. It sure is pretty, though!

Wow. This post has certainly gotten long, hasn't it? Well, I best be going. Got to get stuff done still. Have a fab weekend all!