Bellwether

Have I mentioned that I love my new spinning wheel? Because I do.

I’m hesitant to say that the improvement in my yarns is because of the new wheel, because I think that has more to do with pre-drafting as well as measuring my singles somewhat regularly while I’m spinning to make sure they’re about the same size–I seem to be getting better at spinning fatter yarns, I have some bulky Finn and some worsted weight merino drying in the bathroom–they’re both fairly nice yarns that I’ll be happy to use.

I started some laceweight yesterday–I had a couple of random batts that I’d bought last year from Abby, in the Olive Bar colorway–and the Victoria seems to be handling that just fine, too. I’m not even using the smallest whorl and I’m getting a 40-ish wpi single with minimal effort. It is going to be a bit of a rustic laceweight, the batts are fairly tweedy, but I’m okay with that. They were composed of three colors–grey, purple, and red–and instead of separating the colors and trying to stripe the yarn (ha ha ha), I decided instead to just pull the batts into a roving all at once, so there will be more random mixing. I figure that the colors are close enough to each other in terms of intensity that it will make for a nice muted yarn as opposed to something more garish.

On a more technical note, I’m trying to find either a good source of free WordPress themes or a decent set of tutorials for creating one’s own–I have a bit of experience with coding webpages, but WordPress themes always seemed a bit difficult, but I’m having one heck of a time finding something that suits my aesthetic and actually has the content column wide enough for pictures–so many of them seem to go for the giant fonts of doom + narrow columns, which is so not what I want. Eh, I’ll figure it out I suppose.

I went to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival this past weekend with a few concrete goals in mind.

New wheel (on the left):

Just over a pound of fiber:

And jewelry:

I also stood in line for what felt like forever in order to get a tote bag and a few other tchotchkes.

MDSW is a lot of fun, but I don’t know if I’m going to continue to go. I have fiber in my stash from the first MDSW I went to back in 2005 as well as fiber from the intervening years. I’m not interested in buying yarn, so that eliminates a lot of the vendors from my consideration as well. The crowds are simply terrible and there’s a fair amount of standing around and waiting for people to get out of your way–even in booths that are fairly open. We’ll see how I feel next year, I guess.

When we last saw the green yarn, it was freshly plyed and off the niddy noddy and was a righteously kinky mess. After I took that picture, I ran a hot bath with some wool wash and dunked the yarn and vigorously stirred it up. After letting it sit in the water for a while, I squeezed out most of the water, hung it in the spare bathroom to dry and when I came home from work the next day, this is what I had:

It had pretty much completely relaxed in the wash and turned into a nice bouncy 16-20 wpi yarn. 466 yards, to be precise.  And while there are some mildly kinky spots in the yarn, it’s not so kinky that the finished yarn will bias.

I had a couple of goals with this project. I wanted to spin a yarn which was consistent and suitable for socks and I wanted to see exactly how long each step took.

This yarn was spun semi-worsted using a short draw. I used the largest whorl on the regular flyer of my Lendrum for the spinning and the smallest on the same flyer for the plying.

I feel like I achieved both my goals. The yarn is consistent and suitable for socks, although I have opted to make something else out of it because of the sections that are closer to 20 wpi than 16 or 18 wpi. It took me fifteen hours to make this yarn, excluding the time it took to wash and dry, since those were passive steps that didn’t require my attention.

• Predrafting - 2 hours
• Spinning - 9 hours
• Plying - 3.5 hours
• Skeining - 0.5 hours

The way I figure it, I produced about 31.1 yards of finished yarn for each hour I spent actively working, which is three to five evenings’ investment. Not bad. This is probably the nicest yarn I have spun to date.

As for what I’m making, I decided that Veronik Avery’s Lace Ribbon Scarf from the Spring 2008 Knitty would be just the thing. It’s very quick going so far–the picture below only shows 4 pattern repeats, I’ve done a total of 5.5 as of right. this. instant. and will probably finish out the current repeat after I post this (slow day here at work).

Peaby likes the yarn, too. It was, in fact, the preferred location for his butt last night:

The yarn has since been given a nice hot bath and is drying–I hope to get some pictures of it tomorrow. Once it hit the water, it relaxed significantly.

I’ll have more to write about this yarn after it’s completely done–I did a few things differently and so far, I’m pretty happy with how things have come out.

On the wheel now: mottled green superwash merino that I’m attempting to make sock yarn out of. One of my persistent bugaboos is spinning more consistently, so that’s really what I’m concentrating on. Pre-drafting, frequent check of the single thickness, and a bit of hoping, because so far, it’s spinning up into just the kind of yarn I’m currently liking for socks: tonal variegation, just enough to be interesting but not enough to obscure the stitch pattern.

And the other thing I’m concentrating on is speed–how fast can I spin and ply 4 ounces of yarn?

So far:

• Pre-drafting fiber: 2 hours
• Spinning: 45 minutes

We’ll see how this works out…

Oh, and: I’m going to SOAR this year.  I was initially only going to the retreat portion, but got a cash award at work today that is going to enable me to afford to go for the entire week.  I am applying for a scholarship, but I don’t want to count eggs that haven’t even been laid yet (i.e., I’m still working on my personal essay and it’s rough going).