Fiber: December 2006 Archives
Some days you need a little color therapy. Today was just about as grey as you can get in Chicago. Grey, rainy, cloudy. That it's warm enough to be raining is not entirely a bad thing, but its definitely the kind of weather that gets me down a little bit. Which makes it an excellent time to explore one's fiber room.
This lovely torrent of Romney roving comes from fleecemakers Etsy shop. I believe the colorway is called "Autumn Brights". What is lovely about it is that it that the seller raises Romney sheep and hand dyes the wool. And, if I am doing my math correctly, I have two lovely 4 ounce bundles to spin. Very festive, is it not?
The lovely little lace spindle with the stylized cat design and the notecards (which are hiding behind some of that fiber) come from Spindle Cat Studio. I haven't spun on the little spindle yet (I don't have a fiber delicate enough -- it's only a 1/2 ounce spindle) but it seems to be well balanced. And the cat design gets a big paws up from the felines in the house.
Many many thanks to Emma for this little bundle of holiday treasures. She and I have been trading fibery goodies almost since I started to blog and I consider her one of my dearest blogging-resultant friends even though I've never had the good fortune to meet her in person. It's taken me a little longer than I would have liked to get them on the blog -- mostly because I was hoping I'd get to spin some of the Romney and be able to talk about that too. Today, however, I realized that with all that I've got going on, the spinning might not happen in a timely fashion, and the colors were just too rich not to enjoy and share.
Right now I'm finding it a bit difficult to come up with interesting things to post about given that I am in the early-to-middle phases of a number of projects. The bobbin above is the first 4 ounces of Crown Mountain Farms superwash merino top in "My Boyfriend's Back". If you remember the last time I talked about this sock-yarn-in-progress the picture had a lot more light colors in it. I've officially moved into the darker regions of the yarn which is very red-black. When I last talked about this yarn, I mentioned that for this batch of rovin and my batch of "Sloopy" it seemed like part of the batch had a lot more undyed regions in it than the other part. Teyani left an interesting comment on the post which I think bears repeating for anyone who is interesting understanding why the superwash merino is dyed the way it is, and how Teyani and her Sock Hop spinners create the Sock Hop yarn.
Yes, the white is indeed intentional - for the purpose of making the barberpole yarn. What we do is to split the hank into three sections prior to spinning - light, medium and dark, and then randomly spin from each section, so that the lightest part is spread throughout. makes for some deep striping.
In this case, I just split the batch in half -- the first half contained the lighter third and part of the medium third. The second half (which I have just started) will contain the second half of the medium third and the dark third. It's my hope that this approach will keep my final product a bit darker and thus will keep the resulting socks on the more "manly" side of the spectrum.
As with every other time I've talked about this fiber, I am still very much enjoying spinning it. And apparently I am not the only one. If you want to see the final results of another one of the Crown Mountain colorways (one that I have in my stash and can't wait to spin) Wendy has spun up a skein of two-ply "Do You Believe in Magic". Gorgeous stuff!
