Spinning Camel Down

It's been a while since I've done any spinning and I started getting the bug the other night.  So I put on a dvd and got out my spindle.  The spindle work that I've done in the past has been with longer stapled fibers, but this time I opted for something out of my comfort zone: Camel down!

This stuff is OMG soft!  It's so lovely to touch, you just want to run your hands through it and pet it for hours.

As I said, it's a very short stapled fiber and it's difficult to get the hang of spinning it.  It wants to be spun quick and fairly tight so that the fibers will stay together and not send your spindle flying across the floor.  Go ahead, ask me how I know.  :)  I sent that sucker to the floor quite a few times before I got it under control. 

I've thrown a penny in the pic to give a reference to how fine I've managed to get the singles to be.  I don't normally spin my singles this thin and I'm quite proud of it. 

I'm always amazed when I go from using a wheel to a spindle at how much more I learn about the fibers that I'm working with.  A spindle is more intimate, you work slower and you can stretch thin or bulk the fiber up and generally just "play" with it more.  I think that when working with a new fiber, like I am with the Camel down, it's important to start with a spindle to really learn how that fiber wants to be handled. 

Did I mention that using a spindle, at least for me, is a much slower process?  Everything that you see on the spindle above?  Yeah, that's two hours worth of work.  At this rate it will take the next twelve years of my life to finish it. 



In reference to yesterday's post:  No tenant excitement for me today, another family member was there to witness the eviction.  Ultimately nothing happened.  They're out, house is still standing, end of story.  :)

Apparition Yarn

There's been no knitting while at the lake.  Not because I didn't bring it, but because I've been playing with this:

It's been forever since I've gotten out my wheel, but I was inspired on this trip.   The first fiber that I spun was 4 ounces of 100% merino from the KnitWitch from her Essoterica line in the "Apparition" colorway which you can see in this post.   Yes, it's been almost a year since it was purchased.  I'm a little slow to get things done, okay?

Here it is pre-drafted into some little bird's nests:

And here are the singles from it:

Finally, it was Navajo plied into this:

It's still on the bobbin and hasn't been blocked yet.  I'll probably wait until I get home to finish up the yarn that I make while I'm down here at the lake.  It's a lovely yarn and the pics aren't doing it justice.  Once it's finally finished I'll be sure and show you how it ultimately turns out.

If you look at the link to the fiber that I purchased last year, besides the Knit Witch yarn, you'll see another bit of roving as well.  I'm currently getting it predrafted and ready for spinning now.  8 ounces of luscious softness.  70% wool and 30% seacell in a wonderful coral based colorway.  I'm having a ball spinning yarn this week!

Not One Knit Stitch, but Lot's of Spinning

I took this past weekend off from knitting.  I didn't knit a single stitch.  Not one.    I did, however, do something I haven't done in months:  Spinning!

I have a pile of batts that I have put off and put off some more, mainly because when I did a test sample, the finished product felt like rope, not pretty fluffy yarn.  The culprit in the mix of fibers that's causing the problem is some Corriedale that I knew I shouldn't use and did it anyway.  I thought it would work if it was mixed with some alpaca and faux cashmere.  Nope, didn't work.  This stuff has been staring at me for MONTHS.  I became depressed and just couldn't look at it anymore.  I stored it away in some boxes in a corner under lots of other boxes just hoping that it would change it's mind and become more cooperative, but it didn't.

Until, that is, I had an epiphany on Saturday.  If it wasn't working in a three ply worsted, maybe it was because I had too much twist and it was way too small of a gauge.  So I broke out the spinning wheel  and approached the batts from a different point of view, after I caused an avalanche of boxes, naturally.

The collective "They" say that it's harder to learn to spin big, fat yarn after you have learned to consistently make thin plies of yarn.  Maybe I've been away from it long enough that wasn't an issue.  I did have a harder time keeping in slubs though.  I decided to try for a super bulky art yarn.  This is what I actually got:

More super bulky, less art yarn, but I like it anyway.  The yarn pictured above is approximately 390 yards worth.  I still have a bazillion batts to spin up, but it goes really quick like this.  I've been perusing Ravelry for sweaters that have this gauge yarn and I've found a couple that I might like.

So did spinning it at a larger and looser gauge work?  Yep.  It's much, much softer.  I'm going to keep it as a single ply too.  That way I'll get more yardage that I can work with and it won't lose that softness that I craved when I created these batts.

Stitches South Review

This weekend Stitches South hit the Atlanta Galleria. I showed up promptly at 10:00am on Saturday morning to give it the once over. My family and friends looked at me like I had grown two heads. Why in the world would someone give up a Saturday morning to look at yarn?

Well, it was yarn sensory overload, I'll tell ya that much. There was yarn everywhere. It was bright and beautiful. The folks there did a great job of putting everything together. There were giveaways and fashion shows and classes too. I didn't stay for any of those. I was there a total of two hours and one hour of that was spent going back through a second time.

I had only two issues with the whole thing. One, I was by myself which was totally my fault. If I had checked the Ravelry board in time, I might have had a buddy or two.

The second issue was that I expected there to be more vendors in general and at least a few more vendors that sold spinning stuff. This is in no way a criticism of Stitches, just a perception problem on my side. I think I spoiled myself by going to SAFF in October and that was freakin' huge. Fiber did well there, I saw a lot of ladies walking out with it, so maybe they will keep that in mind for the next event.

Some of the vendors at Stitches that I have to write about:

My LYS: The Whole Nine Yarns from Woodstock, GA. As always, a fabulous setup and the people, Karyn (not sure I spelled her name correctly) and Jenna, were super.

For Fiber: I met the KnitWitch finally and bought some fiber from her. If you need any good knitting videos, you can get them thru her site or just go to Youtube and type in Knitwitch. She's got some great ones that have been very useful to me in the past. She said that she's planning on doing a few more soon. I grabbed some 50/50 merino/alpaca fiber (4 oz.) from her.

I also met the owner of Creatively Dyed Yarn. She was just too cute for words and gave me a free Ravelry button to wear. From her, I bought 8oz. of Seawool fiber - 70%wool, 30% seacell. It's amazingly soft and I can't wait to spin this up.

Both of those gals have some wonderfully dyed yarn and fiber! Here's a pic of the fiber:


I didn't buy one skein of yarn. I figured that I spent way too much of my budget as it was. Not that I could resist, I mean, look just look at that gorgeous fiber! Now I just have to figure out a project to spin yarn for.

I've also started another project. This one is Carol's Clever Little Shawl. I've made it through two of the fourteen repeats so far:

This is from my handspun. I've already got 393 yards spun and some more to be spun for this project. I didn't want to wait until it was all spun before I started it on it. I have no relationship with the word patience!

I'm in love with this pattern. The lady who wrote it studied a shawl from the 1800's and figured out how to reverse engineer it. It's simple and lovely . I really wanted a rustic (and rusty) look to this shawl, so I made sure that my yarn was thick/thin and rusty in color.

All in all, it was a lovely weekend.

Dyeing and Spinning Day

Yesterday was chock full of dyeing and spinning. I got nothing else done except for making dinner and taking kids to and from school.

Here's what I got busy with:

1. Easter Egg Dye: I had three goals with this project.

a) I wanted to play around with mixing some colors. There's a green that I would really like to have a on a sweater, so I got out the Yellow, Blue and Orange dyes and mixed them up. I put a tablespoon of citric acid and one cup of water in glass containers with the dye tablets.

b) Then, I took out some scraps of roving and made crochet chains with them. I wanted to do a different dye technique where I colored the bumps of the chains. I was going for a mottled effect where I would still have some of the white in the roving showing. In the first chain, I combined one part yellow, one part blue and two parts orange. This ended up giving me a lovely olive color, but not what I wanted. The second chain had one part yellow, one part blue and half a part of orange. Got the perfect green in that one. The last chain had all three colors randomly placed all over it, just for fun.

c) Microwave setting the dye (Mini Tutorial). I put the chains, one at a time in a glass dish that was lined with plastic wrap. I then colored them with the dye and then covered the whole dish with more plastic wrap. Next, I turned the microwave on for two minutes. Let it rest for two minutes. Then repeated until the dye was exhausted. Really simple, but you want to be careful not to cook it for longer than two minutes at a time. You could felt your roving/yarn if you cook it longer. Slower is good and it's always better to be safe than sorry!

The Results (re-chained - they were unchained so that they would dry better):

Moss green on top, Mix in the Middle, Olive on the Bottom

I'm thinking I might mix all of these in one tiny spinning project, just for fun.


2. Second dye Project of the day: Dyeing with Dandelions. I made the kids go out with me and pick a big pile of dandelions. It was great fun until we realized there were tiny little bugs on them. Now, I'm a self confessed hypochondriac. It's not good for us to see tiny bugs that might possibly crawl from our hands to the top of our heads. I'm positive no bugs made it into my hair, but now the top of my head has been itching like crazy for two days! I'll tell you about this project more tomorrow, it's still in process.

3. Spinning Project of the day: Actually, this would be a Plying project. I had two bobbins that needed to be plied and this was not how it turned out, at first.:

This was the second time around. The first time was way over-plied, crunchy hard and mega twisty. I ran it back through the wheel and untwisted quite a bit of it. This is approx. 216 yards, give or take. This is a two ply yarn and was intentionally made thick and then. I want this yarn to be more rustic looking.

I have a bobbin of more plied yarn that needs to be skeined and I've got about 4 more ounces to spin and ply of this stuff. I have a project in mind, but there's no guarantee I'll get enough yardage for it. So, I'm keeping the project under my hat until it's determined whether I'll have enough yarn or not.

Whew! That's it. Now can you see why I didn't get anything else accomplished yesterday?

Tertiary Yarn

So yesterday I mentioned that I had been spinning. There is a Ravelry "Spin-a-long" that has us spinning tertiary colors.

Here's a mini color theory lessons for you:

Primary colors - red, yellow, blue
Secondary colors - Mix any of two primary colors - ie: green, purple, orange
Tertiary colors - Mix one primary with one secondary - ie: red-violet, yellow-orange, red-orange, blue-green, etc.

In order to get my tertiary colors, I had to mix some scraps of roving(dyed with Kool-aid and Wilton's) that I had left from previous spinning adventures:




Then I got to mix them up, one primary and one secondary. Here's a pretty poor example, poor mainly in the photo quality, but still, it shows the mixing fairly well:


And then here are the singles, looking very unimpressive by themselves on the bobbin:


I opted not to Navajo ply as I had previously decided, mainly because I wanted enough yardage to do something with it. So I decided to spin some black singles and then 2 ply it up with the tertiary mix. I also threw in the primaries in three different places because I didn't like the color combinations without them.

Can I just say that I absolutely loooovvveee the result?


Now I wish I had more. damn.

After I finished, I still felt like playing with the spinning wheel. I had a bunch of different unplied singles just sitting around with no plan for any of them. Some are from a spinning study that I half-heartedly joined and never finished. Some were from when I first started spinning. None of them by themselves were long enough to do anything with. Therefore, I decided, in an artyarny sort of way, to combine them
all in a sloppy 3 ply.

This is what came from it:

Click to enlarge for details

I'm really curious to knit something with this to see how it knits up. Should be interesting.

I only got about 130 yards off of both skeins, but it should be enough for some small fingerless mitts or a hat or something.

Earning Cash

Slowly, but surely I am earning the cash for my future drum carder. I'm getting the fine 90/120 one. I can't decide if I'm getting the brush attachment or not. It adds about $50.00 to the total. I might just go get a wall paper brush to use instead. I bet the spouse could come up with a way to attach it for pennies.

I've been selling stuff on Ebay and on Craigslist like crazy. I've almost become obsessed with it. I've caught myself walking around the house looking for more stuff to sell. It's kinda fun.

I've been surprised at what has sold versus what hasn't. The nicer stuff has stayed home and the cheaper stuff has gone. The latest thing to be sold, a small, faded Little Tykes play cube that has been living outside, went today to a lady who owns a Doggy Day Care. Who woulda thought that a doggy daycare would use one of those? Cool thing is, I bought the cube for 2 bucks at a garage sale. I got $30 for it today. Way cool.

If anyone is interested, I'm auctioning off Paula Simmon's book Spinning and Weaving with Wool on ebay.

My Knitting Buddy

I shouldn't have

But I did!

I finished the merino today during the Youngest's naptime. My shoulder seems fine right now, we'll see if I aggravated it later tonight.

I'm just tickled with how this yarn turned out. I was a little worried since my second bobbin of singles didn't turn out quite as even, but not to worry, turned out great anyway.

3 Ply Yarn
Fiber(s): Merino (purchased from Cloverleaf Farms) & Rayon
Colorway: Riverstone
Yardage: Approximately 226 yards


I was feeling inspired, so I went out into the garage and dug through my craft bin and came up with some gold rayon thread that had been languishing for quite some time. While it sucked for sewing use, it was superb for spinning. It's incredibly soft, so it didn't take away from the softness of the merino and it gives the yarn a nice touch of glitz.

It's off to be blocked now and then it's destined to become a lovely scarf. I'll give more details on the scarf later.

Merino!

Since Christmas, I've been itching to spend lots of time with my spinning wheel. I got the wheel out and sorted through my options of what to spin.

1. I could pick up where I left off on the whole oatmeal colored fiber that I'm almost finished with, but it's boring me to tears right now, so that was out.

2. Exotic stuff from SAFF - I've got Camel, two kinds of silk, and llama fluff, but I wanted something with color.

3. 3 lbs of Corriedale that's pining away for me to do something with it. First, I need to figure out what color I'm going to dye it. I don't have a clue what color I want. Then I need a non reactive pot. Since I'm going to be using acid dyes in it, it can't be one of my cook pots and I'm not about to sacrifice the ones I've got. I either need to hit a thrift store or walmart for that. The Corriedale is going to have to wait until I pick a pattern (I think), which will lead me to a color (I hope). I'm also thinking about blending in some of the Tussah silk I have with it. So, big project, that's going to have to sit for a while.

So what to spin? At SAFF I also purchased a lovely merino roving from Cloverleaf farms in the color riverstone. It is absolutely yummy. Soft with gorgeous earthtone colors.

I got 2 oz. spun into singles and they looked like this (although the pic doesn't come close to doing it justice:

Click for the full multi color effect!

This is by far and away the most even spinning that I've done. I mean, just look at it, nary a thick or thin to be seen.

I was feeling very clever, and took a two ply worsted yarn I had and split it in twain. Hah! I said Twain. Anyway, I put one of the plies and a sample of the two ply yarn on an index card. I used this as a control card, spinning some and then every once in a while checking to make sure my singles were the same size as the single on my card. Okay, I admit that I stole the idea from David on Ravelry (Ravelry link), but still, you have to admit it's clever. I have since purchased a control card, but until the other bobbin has been finished being spun, I'll continue to use this card to double check myself.

I was planning on doing more of it once I got back from the folks on Monday, but I seem to have damaged my shoulder. I'm hoping it disappears in a week or so and is not a rotator cuff injury. That would totally suck.

It could possibly have been caused by that bin of baseball cards (that belong to my brother that I was transporting for him) that weighed almost a hundred pounds that I had to lift into that back of the minivan that did it. I wouldn't recommend picking up something that weighs almost as much as you do. Really wouldn't. You would have laughed your a$$ off if you had seen what I had to do to get it in the van.

Who knows how I really did it. I just know that my spinning would aggravate the hell out of it if I tried it. Go ahead, picture me crying here. I really want that merino spun up so I can knit with it now! Not sure what I'll do with it. I'm not going to get a lot of yardage out of the 4 oz., I might just have to purchase more. Now wouldn't that be a shame?

Cuteness Overload

This weekend was just overloaded with disgusting cuteness.

First, we were baby sitting my parent's dog, Minnie Pearl. I caught her sound asleep with a toy in her mouth:



And if that wasn't enough, look who I caught trying to spin yarn:

He was honestly trying to get the roving attached so that he could work the pedals and make yarn like Mommy. It was so freakin' cute.

And here's the new project that jumped on the needles this weekend:

This is just the first half of the Mitered Mittens. I'll hopefully have the other half finished (I've probably just jinxed myself) by tomorrow and can give you all the details then.

Spinning!

Way back in July I got this really pretty batch of roving which you can see here. I am still working on spinning it up. Yes, still. There was/is a ton of it. Part of the reason that it is taking me so long to get this finished is that I am having to card it up to get the various and sundry tangles out of it. On my little dog slicker brushes, that is taking a while. The resulting rolags are tiny.

I picked it up again yesterday and finally found a workable system. I card some, spin some. I had been doing all carding and then all spinning and both were getting tedious. I think that I prefer spinning stuff that has at least some color changes to it. The yarn that I am getting is pretty, but the spinning of it leaves much to be desired.

Here is what I did last night = it's still on the niddy noddy:

Click to Enlarge

I really like the results I'm getting. I just wish it wasn't taking me so long to get it done. I really, really want to play with the fiber that I got at SAFF. I'm trying to be good and finish it first though.

*****

By the way, You know it's getting cold when...

...Every single time you sit down at your desk you get a lap full of cat:

Making Tweed Yarn

Remember this colorway of roving that I blended together, the Midnight in the Garden one?

Well, I've been itching to try my hand at making a tweed yarn. So, I got out the ghetto hand cards (Dog slicker brushes) and using this tutorial from David and this tutorial from Abby, got to blending the Midnight in the Garden roving.

I had so much fun doing this. I made a bazillion rolags and took them with me to the folks' place this past weekend. I got about half of it spun up and guess what? I made tweed singles! This was so cool. I had been scared to blend the roving, scared of losing all that beautiful color. But I didn't.

The mohair disappeared, but all spread out it makes the rolag look iridescent like the film on a bubble. In the singles, it gives it a surprising sheen if held in the light a certain way. The base of the singles is now a pretty charcoal gray and there are little bits of orange, turquoise, lime green, pink and dark blue scattered throughout. When plied, I should have a pretty heathery charcoal tweed to show off.

It turned out so much better than I expected:

Click to enlarge and see the pretty singles!

Check out all the little bits of fluff in the rolag behind the bobbin. It was almost impossible to get a good pic of the rolag, this was the best I could do. It's amazing how in dull light it looks like steel wool. Looks much better here.

As for the "W" tank top, I finished the first side. As for the second, I had completed about half of it when I realized that I had made a huge honkin' mistake in it and had to frog back to the first wedge and that's where it stands now. I'm hoping that I can make some inroads on that this weekend on the really long drive we have to FLA.

Aren't the colors beautiful?

I got busted by the fiber cop.

Yesterday the Eldest learned to ride a bike! Just one month before his 8th birthday. Yeah!

He also, a little later, had his first bike crash and got this lovely memento of the event:

His first, (but not last) bike injury!

Ouch! As he crashed, the handlebars scraped his ribs and he came screaming over to me with huge tears in his eyes. Hopefully this won't keep him from getting back on the bike. It's hard being seven, isn't it?

I spent the whole weekend being a big bully by making him get on the bike that he was so scared of falling off of in order to teach him how to ride the stupid thing. We celebrated his learning by taking a trip to the store and buying him the Transformer I promised if he learned how to do it by yesterday evening. This is a child that learns better if he has a goal to shoot for and the Transformer was it.

***

I also got busted by the fiber cop (husband) while I was away. I had ordered more fiber from the Sheep Shed Studio and was hoping that it would come in by Friday so it could be squirreled away with no one being the wiser. No such luck. The box came in on Monday and I had to fess up that I had placed another order. Oops.

In the box was a grab bag and some black/white roving. I plan on dyeing up most of it, but not this:

Click for detail.

This is the most fantastic oatmeal colored roving that I've seen. It was part of the grab bag. I'm keeping it "as is." There's 14.4 ounces of it. Hopefully I'll have enough when I'm done to make a small sweater out of it, at least a tank top. Love it.

I need danger pay

Well, the result I got (unblocked as yet) when I plied some of the singles was sooo not what I was expecting. The red in the yarn became much softer, and it almost has a tweedy effect, especially since I couldn't get out some of the little slubs that are in there.


I should get danger pay for writing the blog. It almost cost me my life to take that picture just to show you the yarn. The blood sucking mosquitoes just about sucked all the blood out of me.

We are prisoners in our house in the summer thanks to those little beasts. There's no way I can let the kids go in the backyard to play unless they are completely covered in chemicals. I hate it. I can't even kick them out of the house when I get aggravated with them. Not fair, not fair, not fair...

What colors make you happy? For me, it's bright vivid colors. A bright cheery red makes me break out in huge smiles.

I've been having so much fun lately blending different colors of roving and then spinning them up to see what I get. Want an example?

Check out this roving here:


A blend of Coral Red, Turquoise Blue and a Gold. The gold is really neat. One minute it's gold and the next a real subtle green. It completely depends on the light and which of the two colors are next to it.

I've blended it twice (by putting it through the hackle) to get a less pronounced striping effect. I really like it.

Here's what it looks like spun up as a single:
The color is a bit bright in that one. Here they are together and a little less bright:

I'll be pulling out those couple of slubs when I ply it. Even with the slubs it looks pretty neat. This colorway would be a fun one to do as an art yarn as well.

I can't wait to see what it looks like as a plied yarn!

Samples and techniques

Yesterday I showed you a pic of the "Lemon Sherbert Swirl" colorway. I spun it up (approx. fingering wt.) a tiny sample of it and this is how it turned out:

Click for detail

Much prettier than I expected. I like it anyway. The problem is, I never wear yellow. Makes me look sickly and washed out. I'm pale as pale can get, glaringly white even, so I don't know if this colorway is for me, but it was a dream to spin.

A fun thing happened yesterday. I taught myself a fun artyarn spinning technique. Most of my yarn has been "artyarn", albeit unintentionally. This time, I did it on purpose.

The technique came from the latest issue of Spinoff magazine. It's a core yarn. The technique is a bit tricky. You have to spin your wheel counterclockwise and use a handspindle that is spun clockwise. Your core yarn is on the spindle and your singles are on a bobbin on a lazy kate. You ply them together then stop and push the singles up on the core. You are not twisting the two together, but wrapping the singles around the core. It's a juggling game at first, but turns out very neat:

Click to enlarge for detail

I do have to warn you though. It eats up your singles like you wouldn't believe.

The tiny bit you see there is all I have, just a few yards. I have no clue what I'll ever do with it, but it's an interesting technique to learn anyway. The first thing my husband said when he saw it was "It'd make great dreadlocks!"

DIY! My new toy!

This weekend I found a new DIY project to tempt me away from all other responsibilities. I made a Hackle.

What the H*ll is a Hackle you ask?

It's a tool used for combing out and blending fiber which is then pulled through a Diz to make roving for spinning. That's it in a nutshell.

First, I'd like to thank Travis (who is married to the Yarnzombie) from the blog The Land for coming up with this idea which costs about $10 bucks to make. Brilliant. They have a couple of videos at The Land that show you how to use the Hackle along with the how to for making it.


What you need for the whole project:

Combs or hair picks
Board
Self Drilling Screws
Drill - If you use a screwdriver it make take you two years to complete
Diz or Button
Crochet Hook
Board
C Clamps

I made one modification to the project and that was using combs instead of hair picks. That way, I wouldn't have to cut anything off at the bottom. My hubby already gets really nervous when I start these kind of projects. I can't imagine the apoplectic fit he would have had when I went for the jig or circular saws. :)

It's very simple. I grabbed a large vise while working on the project and put the board in it to hold it steady. Then I placed a comb on the edge of the board and used masking tape to hold it steady. The masking tape also helps to keep the screws from traveling all over the place while your drilling and it helps cut down on the scratching and/or splitting of the combs. Then just grab your drill and screws and go to town attaching those combs to the board.



The length of the board is up to you. The longer the board, the longer the piece of roving that you will end up with.

Here it is complete and clamped to the table with the C-clamps:

Here's the button that I grabbed to use as my Diz and the crochet hook used to pull the fibers through the button holes:


Now why on earth would you want to do this? Here's one example for you.

Here's some roving that came in a grab bag when I placed an order at Sheep Shed Studio. I love grab bags, you never know what you'll get. This, though, was fugly and matted. It looked like the hair that comes off the rear end of a mangy dog:

Yuck!

How does it look now after putting it through the Hackle?

Lovely

I'm dying to play with blending different color fibers now. I've got some roving (some wool and some mohair) soaking in the sink now in preparation for dyeing. I'm going to dye 8 different batches of color and then play with the new hackle.

Spinning epiphany and a Knitting FO!

Spinning:
I had a minor epiphany today while spinning. I have been spinning with the short draw technique for a while, but I've not been very pleased with it. So I did some research on ravelry, google and youtube. I love the youtube videos that you can find for spinning. There are some that explain things and there are those that just show.

I read up on the long draw and tried it. Disaster. Couldn't make it do a thing. I watched the videos of it. It worked a little better. But the epiphany came when I loosened the scotch tension so that it wasn't pulling the yarn up onto the bobbin until I "helped" it along with my left hand. I also learned when to tighten my fiber holding hand and when to loosen it up. Wow, what a difference it made. I'm now spinning softer thinner yarn! Very cool.

Knitting:
I apologize if I've had few FOs lately. I know they've been few and far between, but that happens when you have kids around during the summer.

For the record, I'm soooooo ready for school to start. Aug 7th is the date for the Eldest to start and the Youngest will begin pre-school just a few weeks later. I can't wait.

I do, however, have a FO for you today. I know that I said that the Kitty Pi would be distraction knitting only, but it turns out that I can't knit the wedding shawl with the Youngest around. It's just too complicated and the Youngest is a huge distraction.

This is a good example of the kind of distraction he is:

The cats are ready for school too. Their tails are sore.

But there is some cuteness to be found. Especially at naptime:

Sound asleep with a trader joe's balloon for company

So, Kitty Pi was complete as of last night.

Inverted Kitty Pi

When upright, all you see are the pink sides, not the white and blue stuff on the bottom. but only because I ran out of the white and blue.

1 out of 3 kitties approves.

Spinning FO

I got off my duff and got some stuff done this weekend once I got home.

First off, I got over feeling sorry for myself. That was a biggie folks.

Second, I finished spinning and plying the silky soft wool/mohair Mint Chocolate Chip colorway that I dyed last week:

On the bobbin - this color is correct

Skeined - color is off, see above

There's approximately 328 yards of yarn there. I apologize for the bad lighting in the second pic. I went outside for the first one and was attacked by a mob of mosquitoes. Not wanting to face any more of the critters, I high-tailed it inside.

It's amazing how much my spinning has bitten into my knitting time. I'm still knitting, just not as much.

I did make major progress last night on the secret birthday knitting though and I'll make a little more once the kids disappear for the evening. It's an acrylic project and it's killing my hands to work with it. I missed my deadline getting it done, but since I was with the gift-ee all last week, it wouldn't have been a secret if I worked on it in front of her now would it?

I've got a dye project to show you tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Oops. Missed a day. I'm blaming it on the lake atmosphere. I headed out of dodge for the week and I'm still here. I figured that if I stayed at home I would just fret and worry about the camp that I'm not at. So, here I am at the lake.

But! Here's something cool that I dug up at my folks place. A pair of hand cards that belonged to my g-grandmother and possibly to hers. They were made in the mid 1800s or so.

There is still a stamp on them that is just barely visible. It took some time doing internet research to fill in the missing blanks, but it reads:

"The only genuine Old Whittemore Patent, Improved, No. 10 Cotton, L.S. Watson & Co., Leicester, Mass."

The tines are in horrible condition, but the wood (maple) is fine. I would like to replace them with tines for wool if I can find some. Not sure where to look. I'll ask on Ravelry to see if anyone knows.

Mama Poole's Cotton Handcards

Horrible condition
Here's some cuteness for you. She was "helping" me take pics of everything:

Miss Minnie

Something else that I did this weekend was dye more roving. The roving is from Sheep Shed Studio and is a merino/mohair combo. It looks like Mint Chocolate Chip to me, especially spun up. I'll show you some of that later.


Yum, Mint Chocolate Chip!



I'm not extremely pleased with the dye job. I may go back later and overdye the yarn, we'll see. I used dylon dyes in lime and bahama blue.