handspun funtimes: an open letter

Dear everyone,

I made some yarn. It’s a very dignified sort of deep magenta, which less discriminating types might call pink. I like it an awful lot.

I’m not tremendously sophisticated when it comes to my spinning, so I spun this pretty much the way I’ve been spinning all of my yarn lately: short draw for singles, chain plied, washed & thwacked. Someday I will branch out and learn an exciting new spinning skill, but not today.

The fiber is from v i o l a, it’s her BFL top in raspberry. I absolutely adore the way she dyed this, with just enough variegation to be interesting. It’s fingering weight, and I am tremendously proud of myself for that, because, a) I was patient enough to spin a whole four ounces of fiber into teeny tiny singles without getting frustrated, and b) now I have 291m of fingering weight yarn.

c) I’m 99% sure that’s enough for a pair of socks, if you are me and have small feet!

d) Handspun socks! That’s not quite something to cross off my to-do list, but it’s awfully close.

In conclusion, I am very, very excited to finish my big blue blanket so that I have an excuse to get this yarn onto my needles.

Love,
Me

this is another spinning post

I had the chance to go to the DKC Knitter’s Frolic this weekend. (For the not-from-Ontario: the Frolic is a weekend-long fiber festival, with workshops and a marketplace full of lots of awesome people.) I went last year, not really knowing what to expect, but this year I had plans. I had a Market Agenda, which is important if you’re a person like me who is easily dazzled by soft, fluffy wool and pretty colours.

I mentioned to Steph that I wanted to spin more this year, and that one of my goals was to stock up on some spinning fiber. I feel pretty comfortable spinning small, 4-oz batches of yarn, but I’d really like to start trying to spin with greater quantities, so that I can make larger projects. And she wandered around the market with me and pointed out all of the good places to get fiber, while I thought about all of the awesome things I could spin.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up wandering home with a little over a pound of BFL/Shetland lamb roving. Let me tell you, that is one way to get some funny looks on the subway.

(Cat for scale)

I got it from Hopeful Shetlands, and it is gorgeous. It’s got this really nice soft, sproingy texture, and it’s undyed, but the colour is beautiful. I absolutely love the look of naturally black/brown wool.

My goal is to sit down with this on a regular basis over the summer, and turn it into yarn. I tend to go on spinning jags, where I’ll use my wheel a lot for a couple of weeks and then let it languish, but this is some pretty solid motivation for me to use the wheel more regularly. (Also, uh, the Big Bag of Fiber doesn’t really fit into my stash boxes so well. A Much Smaller Bag Of Yarn will.)

It’s also a pretty great incentive to finish up the project I’ve got on my wheel right now.

spinning and a link

Not a lot of knitting to report lately, but I’ve been spinning an awful lot.

This is SweetGeorgia Yarns’ superwash merino, in a colourway called Honey Fig. It’s really interesting spinning it up – it’s a series of lovely, deep red-purples punctuated by long runs of bright yellow, and I’m still trying to decide exactly how that’s going to translate into a yarn that I’ll use. In the meantime, though, it’s a lot of fun to look at. I’m finding myself waiting for the yellow parts as I spin, just because I love the way the yellow parts look next to the purple on the bobbin.

In other news, I’m a little obsessed with this blog called How To Be A Retronaut. They have a lot of really interesting posts featuring photos from familiar places in the past, which is one of my favourite things. In particular, I love thinking about the differences in perspective – how new and current Kodachrome photos must have seemed in the early part of the 20th century, and how quaint and vintage they are now.

Anyway, this post featuring photos from Ireland in the 1920s caught my eye, and I wanted to share it with all of you. There are knitters, and I find that charming as well.