2/3rds there!

Handblended Arizona Sycamore
Originally uploaded by WoodlandSprite

I finally "finished" spinning that big bowl of fiber - skeined it off to check the yardage, and I have 608 yards - I need 900-1000 yards for the Wing o the Moth, which is what this fiber has been clamoring to be turned into. I am planning on knitting it with singles - It should be interesting seeing how the color variation plays out - this batch of singles was handblended without tools, the next batch of singles (which, I hope will get me to where I need to be yardage-wise!) will be spun from one of my blended batts off my carder...When I first measured the yardage, I thought of knitting the first set of motifs of the shawl with a complementary colored handdyed commercial yarn, but figured that would just look odd. So I'll be spending more time spinning - I'm planning on using this more variegated hand blended yarn on the outer portion of the shawl....

Tarot Baggie

Or baggie for anything else for that matter, but this is intended for one of my favorite tarot decks, The Shape Shifter Deck.
The yarn I used for it was a wool and cotton blend that I blended myself on the Pat Green in the background of the photo. If you have ever seen Paton's Mosaic yarn, this is very similar. The cotton creates very soft nubs all over the yarn. I spun it a little thick so it came out bulky at 9 WPI. So the bag was a quick project. I also added a leaf lace motif in the middle so I could see into the bag without digging whatever cards were in it out. I have to do this with my cloth bags because you can't see through them, and sometimes you can't recognize what deck is in the bag from peeking in from the top. The closure cord is some of the yarn plied back onto itself to make cording (you over-spin to plies together, fold the length of yarn in half, then spin back the opposite way to get it to curl around itself).
This bag was super simple at 24 stitches (12 on each side).

The brown yarn is of luxurious softness, a wool and yak down blend (also blended on the drum carder). The yak is dark brown while the wool was a lighter chestnut brown. When blended together the tone deepened and the softness increased. Very nice fine Shetland wool and yak yarn.

I am doing a lot of blending, spinning, and sampling of the resulting blend to get a better idea of what one can blend successfully on the drum carder. This "research" (AKA- FUN!!!) will be apart of Part 3 of my video tutorial on youtube.com.

Until next time!

Blending madness!

I've been carding away on my new spinning toy, the drum carder. I created this batt for a video tutorial on How to Use a Drum Carder and here is ther resulting yarn and test knitting of it into a mitered square. The other two colors are also some of my own spun yarns. Click the photos for larger versions.




Until next time...

Half Spun

I posted about a week ago with my fiber and hardware (ashford wheel and spindolyn). ...I've made some progress:


I've got about 580-590 yards of it done - and I ordered more angora and it arrived over the weekend (fast shipping!!). I'm about to start spinning the second half tonight. I still haven't decided on a pattern, although I'm planning to visit my LYS tomorrow and look through theirs to see if something strikes me as right for this yarn. I just love how it's turning out (I left it on the mantel for a couple of days just so I could see it often!).

I'm hoping to be done spinning within the next week... we'll see how that goes. Seeing everyone else's projects is a lot of fun!

--Lucy