All Plied Up

I've plied and set all my pink and black yarn :)

To recap, I bought 75g of pink and 75g of black corriedale fibre from twist fibre in December, with the intention of spinning them to equal weights and then knitting some colourwork mittens. It took me a while to spin it all up using my spindle, but I just love spindling :)

I got a new niddynoddy from Twist Fibre on Saturday, and quickly got to work skeining up the yarn I've made. I have 4 skeins of black and 2 of pink.



This is my new niddynoddy. It's an Ashford one, it makes 60" skeins. I love it, it makes it so much easier to skein yarn and to measure it.

And the obligatory arty shot ;)



I think my yarn turned out to be more of a laceweight than a fingering weight though. I at first thought that it would be a DK weight, but apparantly I got carried away with spinning finer and finer :) I have 822.5 yards of the pink, and 743 yards of black yarn. The black seems a little thicker. I'll have to weight the skeins again now that they've been washed and set etc. Just in case that made a difference ;) But those numbers seem quite laceweight-y to me. Because of this, I'm not sure it'll work for mittens. I don't think I'm patient enough to knit laceweight mittens!! :D But I think the pink would look lovely in a stole or shawl just by itself. I just have to see it as an exercise in letting the fibre become what it wants. I can always spin more yarn to make mittens from :)

Social Crafting

I haven't written since before I went to the spinning guild, but I have that and more social knitting to write about! I've been a busy little bee :D

The guild was awesome!! It was so lovely to be in a room full of people who were also really into making things with fibre! It was the first meeting of the year, and also the Annual General Meeting of the guild so there were a lot of people there. The hall was full of spinning wheels and looms :) I took my spindle along and started plying my pink yarn while I was there. I got a bit tangled more than once, but it was lots of fun, and to see the things other people were making was just so inspirational. There were amazing arty yarns which I just loved. It gave me lots of ideas :) There were also projects people had brought that they had made from their own handspun, or yarn or fibre they had dyed, and it was so cool to see just what could be made! Who knew that all these talented crafters lived near me? It's something you don't hear about generally, but there are all these people around being so creative and amazing, it's just astounding!

Once I got back home, I sat and plied yarn all evening on my spindle. I figured out the perfect technique for minimizing tangles while sitting on my sofa (not sure I could manage it while in public, but I'm sure I'll be able to figure something out) My singles had been rolled into a ball, because they were so thin that it seemed easier to do that than attempt to ply it using my makeshift lazykate (chopsticks and a cardboard box). Ha!! The balls rolled everywhere, got tangled in everything. Then the singles would twist back on themselves and create knots that I had to untangle while trying to keep everything else from tangling. I figured that when I'm on my sofa at least, I can put one ball on my knee, and one down by my left side on the sofa. Then I put a book or something in front of that ball to stop it rolling on the floor (the one on my knee I have more control over stopping doing that) That seems to work well for plying thin singles on a spindle. I'll need to get a photo of me doing that, I don't know if I described it well enough.

I also was so excited that I blabbed on to the bf and his mother for about two hours about spinning and all the ideas I had. I'm sure they thought I was completely mental, especially when I told them about my idea for an art yarn involving barbie heads ;) But it had been so nice to be with people who understood spinning and crafting and accept the mentalness that goes with it :)

Then this Saturday I went to the knitting group at Twist Fibre craft studio. That was a lot of fun. I was knitting my Maeva socks (more on those in another post, but here's a quick pic)



I was on the cuff, which is just moss ribbing and I had been getting a bit bored working on them at home, so I took them with me. I managed to race 3/4 of the way up the cuff while I was there, which was great! It was much easier to knit them while talking to other people about knitting and crafting (and a side journey into talking about bed bugs and cockroaches, but I won't subject you to that here, it made me itch just thinking about them!) My friend that I'd gone with came to the Twist Fibre group too, so that was fun, to see her again.

I had loads of fun at both these events, and now I can't wait till next month for the next meetings :)

Excited :D

Tomorrow I'm going to a spinning guild meeting :)

Well, a weaving/spinning/dying guild, but there's spinning!! And since I've been using my spindle more and more recently, I'm super excited about going.

One of my friends from dance class spins, and it turns out that she's been going to this guild for ages, so I asked her if I could tag along :D The meeting is held in a nearby village, so it's easily reachable by the bus, which is great! I'm very excited about getting to meet other people who do fibery stuff. I already go to the knitting morning which is held every month at my LYS (twist fibre craft studio), and it'll be great to meet even more people who are into the same stuff as me. From what my friend told me about the guild, it sounds very interesting - classes, sales, demos, I can't wait!!

Here's some of the spinning I've been doing recently.







It's hot pink corriedale, which I purchased from twist fibre. I've got about 75g of that and 75g of black, which I've already spun up into singles. However, tiny black strands of fibre is really hard to photograph :/ The pink was easier :) I've finished spinning the pink into singles now, and I'm going to ply them up next. Just black with black and pink with pink. Then I'm going to make some colourwork mittens or something with them. I think it'll end up being a DK weight. I'm using my smaller spindle that I got at Knit Camp, and I'm getting a lot better at spinning the singles consistently. There's still some thicker and some thinner bits, but it'll even out in the plying, I think.

Can't wait till tomorrow!!! :D