Spinning Wednesday

For the second week in a row I have an FO for you.  Quite frankly it’s about time because I feel like I have been plying this for months.  So here we are, 345m and 46g of 2ply merino tencel from FeltStudioUk.

This has turned out really lovely, smooth and shiny and the colours look great.  This was only half the top and I will start spinning the second lot soon, but because I like a bit of variety I started spinning this instead

 This is some top merino silk I got from Shunklies a little while back.  I decided to make this a bit stripy and found that if I split the top in a certain place I had two matching lengths with just a bit leftover that didn’t match anything.  I’ve therefore split that bit into four skinny strips and am spinning that separately, the idea being that I’ll have a little mini skein with much shorter stripes which I can use to accent the longer striping main skein.  Well that’s the plan anyway, who knows how it will actually turn out!

Spinning Wednesday

Now I’m finally getting around to actually doing some knitting I’ve decided to just dedicate Wednesday’s to talking about my spinning.  Because I have so many projects on the go I very rarely actually finish anything so I think just one weekly update is quite enough.

So what’s been spinning this week?  Mostly I’ve been concentrating on a second spindle full of the sparkly BFL from FeltStudio UK.  I could see the end of the section of fibre coming closer and close and with 2 staple lengths left to go – disaster!  The piece of yarn that I use as a stopper when the spindle has no notch (tutorial here if anyone’s interested) snapped and I discovered that the edge of this spindle has no grab whatsoever and I could not get spinning at all.  I’m sure someone more experienced knows what to do for the best here, but because I’m planning on chain plying this I’m just going to wind it off as if it were finished and ply it as it is.  I’ve got another 50g of this to spin so I’ll add the last little bit to that and try to stop twitching every time I think about deliberately making one skein bigger than the other.  Yes, I have issues (don’t even ask me about people who purposefully wear odd socks!)

Other than that, I am making slow progress plying the first 50g of the merino tencel from FeltStudioUK.  It turns out that plying bores me so I have to do it in small batches.  I’m thinking that chain plying will go faster for me because it’s a little bit more involved.  I’ve started chain plying this black/white/grey merino but I’m going slowly because my toilet roll middle got all squished and it’s making things a little difficult.  I think I may have to pinch the toilet roll holder from the bathroom and see if that helps a little.

And, finally, because I just can’t keep myself away from Etsy I now have some new batts to spin.  Look how pretty they are.

These are from Karmicdelight found here.  They are lovely little batts, each around 0.5oz with loads of interesting stuff in there.  Alison is an absolute pleasure to buy from and showed a genuine interest in what I was planning to do with her batts.  I can’t recommend her highly enough.

Stress

I'm not one for stress, I don't enjoy it and I don't thrive off it like some so I try not to do it.  Yesterday the world seemed to have other ideas and I'm stressed about being stressed about things I don't want to stress about.  Marvellous.  However, while all around me were demanding answers about wedding cakes and cars and flowers and all manner of other matrimonial fripperies I had new fibre to play with.  Thank heaven for sheep.....and Etsy!  Cue terrible phone pics - I really need to find the cable to charge my camera!

So pretty...this is a merino and tencel blend which is so soft and smooth I kind of want to sleep on it and the colours are just irresistible.

This is BFL with sparkles, I've only spun merino so far so I thought I'd give BFL a go and these colours are fantastic - even if they do remind me of a shell suit I have in the 80s.  These are both by Daniela of FeltStudioUk and I can heartily recommend her.  The braids came so quickly and she has so many colours to choose from, plus she slipped this in my package too:

I don't know what fibre this is and I would never choose greens to buy, but it is so lovely that I started to spin it immediately - despite needing to finish plying the sparkly pink merino.  Oh well, I guess the heart wants what it wants - and right now any distraction can only be a good thing.