My weekends used to be fairly quiet, and frankly, lonely. Since I've started spinning, I've made lots of new friends in my guild and it's been wonderful. Saturday was our monthly guild meeting. Afterward, Eric and I drove to another guild member's house where she had bags and bags for fleeces that she wasn't going to do anything with. So, I got myself 5 pounds of a lovely chocolate brown Corriedale fleece for a dollar a pound. Oh, yeah!
At the meeting, I picked up a drop spindle lazy kate made by Shannon of SpinSanity.
You wind the singles off the drop spindle onto the PVC tubes until you're ready to ply. I had wound my singles onto toilet paper tubes when I started spinning the Merino/pygora fiber I bought months ago. My initial attempts at plying had the TP tubes on a regular lazy kate and that didn't work well at all. I plunked the TP tubes on the spokes of my new kate and it worked like a dream. Between Saturday night and Sunday, I plied this:
To give you an idea of the size, the whorl is 3.5 inches in diameter and the cop (the cone of wound yarn) is about 6 or 7 inches long. This is the most spindle-spun yarn I've ever made, about 135 yards. I still haven't figured out yet how to get consistency in my twists per inch but over all, I'm pretty pleased with the results.
As promised, here's a shot of last week's spindle-spun yarn, washed and dried:
That is amazing. I love new gadgets!
Posted by: elizabeth | October 13, 2008 at 05:14 PM
love the yarn - what will you make with it?
Posted by: val | October 13, 2008 at 07:42 PM