The wheel's been a spinnin'!

Well, I've not kept up with this as I ought to have, but life's gotten in the way.

I spun up another bobbin-worth of my standard gray heather and ended up plying it, finishing it all up during Too Cute Tuesday (see the blog that started it all: http://www.breakingeven.typepad.com/). I ended up with a skein worthy of knitting and a few people to ooh and ahh over it.

I've finally gotten so I'm pretty good at keeping even tension and twist. Next? Getting the final weight to be what I want. I think this time, I was shooting for worsted, but I didn't make the singles thin enough.

I'm trying to sort out what to knit with it. I want it to be something I'll use, either wear or have about. My mum found a great website - http://simpleknits.blogspot.com/2008/03/500-patterns-to-knit-with-1-285-yards.html. I'm enjoying looking at my yarn and imagining what it will be. In the meantime, I may have found a sweater I want to try. Anyone who knows me (and my problem with UFOs) must be surprised. A conversation at work with one of our postdocs made me start thinking - maybe I just get bored too quickly and need a more complicated pattern.Last night, I decided that I needed some spinning therapy. Ghandi believed the deepest state of spinning was a state of zen, and I think he had a point (like he did about so many things). I decided to spin up the wool I dyed green a few weeks ago. I like it much better all spun up than in the fiber - it has lovely tones of grey you can't really see in the pictures. On that note, I need to work on taking much better pictures. I guess that some pictures are better than no pictures.

The whole bunch of it (and it was quite a bit of a bunch - you can see the dyed roving in an earlier post) was spun up in about an hour and a half. It's about lace weight now so now for the big decision: do I keep it at lace weight or ply it with some lace-weight gray?

Now that I look at these pictures, some of them are pretty good, nice and "arty." One of these days I'll get good functional pictures, too!


Tomorrow or the next day I'm going to be going on a fiber-slurge. I think I'm going to try some dyed wool from a different type of sheep and probably some vegetable fiber, bamboo or soy. I would desparately like a new bobbin for my wheel. It's getting old to wind off the single to ply anything or work on another project. I'd also like a niddy noddy so I really know how much yarn I've got. We'll see.