Muse Breaks

A friend of mine came into town yesterday and we raided the local wool shop!  We both had a little trouble buying only what we could afford...

I got allll this:

Top left and clockwise:  2 oz baby camel and tussah silk (my indulgence!), 4 oz kid mohair, 16 oz bamboo silk, 2 oz superfine merino and angora, 4 oz milk fiber.  Oh, and a new bottom-whorl spindle!  We named it "Bobo."

I started out spinning the milk fiber and I freaking LOVE it.  It has a weird crimp to it, a very small one, that makes the resulting yarn look textured and already plied, despite being a single.  I'm not sure if all milk fiber is this way or not, but you won't hear me complaining, it's cool!  I think it makes it a little stronger, too, than the bamboo I've been spinning that has a tendency to slip apart while spinining.

I'm also spinning the milk on Bobo, which is weird to me.  I've never been able to DROP a drop spindle before because I've only ever worked on a Turkish spindle:

It was always too heavy, and the bamboo too slippery, to drop and spin.  I would put the pointed end on the ground and spin it, adding tension as I gained twist, then moving the twist up the fiber separately.  Spinning on Bobo is a whole new world to me!

I like it, though, and it's lightweight enough that I can focus more on other aspects of the spinning and consistency rather than on how likely I am to break the yarn.

My fiance and the girl I went with also got fiber - she got some wool and had a blast learning how to spin it up on her own Turkish spindle.  My fiance got two silk caps, which are WEIRD.  I don't even know how he spun them.  The staple is SO VERY LONG.  He wound up making silk rope out of them, and proved that you don't need a fancy spindle to spin:

That stuff. is. strong.



Remind me to post our Chicken Parmigiana recipe later when I have access to it, ya?  It was the most amazing part of Christmas.  If I could only eat one thing for the rest of my life, it would be that.

-MM

I've really dived (dove?) headfirst into this spinning stuff.  I turned my 4 ounces of undyed kid mohair into a chunky single and crocheted it into half a hat.  Sooner or later I'll get around to picking up some more and finishing it, heh.

Then I wound my very first skein with, oh I have no idea, 2 or 3?  ounces of 2-ply bamboo silk that was my fiance's fiber...but he wasn't using it anyways.  It came out a little wavey thanks to not quite getting it perfectly even (at all), but it looks gorgeous:

Then I soaked it and set it aside to set, and because I didn't want to make mittens for my fiance out of it just yet.  It's about 76 or so yards if I calculated it right.  More on that in a sec.

Now I'm working on making thinner, more consistent yarn out of the same bamboo silk.  Right now it looks like thread, but I'm not sure if I'll ply it or not.  It takes so much twist to make it that thin and still hold together that I might ply it simply to keep it from tangling too much to use.  We'll see.  I have a ton of it so far but no good pictures because...well, because I don't want to go take one right now.

It's great to make it so thin because it takes me longer to work my way through the fiber.  I'm really getting faster at spinning, though, which is awesome!



Okay, so about plying, the internet REALLY had to help me out with this one.  I had one length of yarn because I couldn't wrap my brain (punny) around how to get two equal lengths of yarn in order to ply them without wasting any.  I found this video on youtube that really helped me out a TON:



I first wound it off the spindle into a ball.  No, not a center-pull ball (still haven't looked up how to do that), just around my fingers a few times then around itself over and over in a ballish fashion:

It looks adorable as a ball.  Ripe for kitten-torture.

Then I did as the video commanded and made myself an Andean bracelet:

When I had my two-ply length of yarn on my spindle all pretty and twisted (don't even talk to me about plying consistently, I got nothin', but it seems easier to do on an insanely expensive spinning wheel than on a spindle) I made myself a skein.  It took me a zillion tries.  I don't have a niddy noddy (a ridiculously simple-looking contraption that makes wrapping easier than what I'm about to confess), so I first wrapped it around a book.  Too small.  Then a box.  Still too small.  My skein looked laughably short and didn't have enough to fold on itself once twisted.

Finally I wrapped my skein around a BIGGER box.  Then I tied little strips of sheer ribbon I had on hand loosely around it in several places, pulled it off the box, twisted it and folded it into a skein.  I guessed that the length around the box to be about 4 feet, so I counted up the number of circles of yarn I had created and multiplied it by 4 - much easier than laying the yarn down the street and walking down it with a ruler.  MUCH.

I'm waaaay looking forward to heading to the fiber shop tomorrow with my new paycheck and trying out a couple of different types of fibers.  I'm ashamed to admit I'm already hooked on luxury fibers - mohair, angora, cashmere, milk top (SO FREAKIN' COOL), bamboo rayon, blah blah blah.  So.  Pretty.  One of these days I'd like to have enough yarn spun up that I can convince myself I won't use all of it and can start selling skeins on Etsy.  Wouldn't that be nice?  Looks like the average going price is around 10 cents a yard.  It'd be nice to have a little pocket cash to fund...the purchasing of even more fiber.  Yay for self-sustainable hobbies?  :)

I haven't dyed any yarns yet but I am SUPER excited about trying it out eventually.  Sure the nice dyes at the shop are dreamy, but what I'm really excited about is Kool Aid.

Yah.  That's right.  Kool Aid.

Awesome, no?

I'm also looking wayyy forward to the fiber festival in mid-April.  I don't have any idea if I'll have the money to go to it or to buy anything, but can you imagine being able to touch, feel, and mess with fiber, yarn, and spindles from some 20 or 30 LOCAL producers and artisans?

So excited!

I promise one day I'll have a normal house again, and then I can come back to talk to you about something besides spinning and yarn crafts.  Like home making, art, gardening, cooking, e-t-c.  In the meantime it's just about the only hobby I have the time for, sorry guys!

-MM