Monday, January 28, 2013

Impromptu Spin

What do you do when your silk spinning project falls from a book case into the potty that you have just lifted your baby from after her big morning wake-up pee? (Don't you just love babies with a dry diaper in the morning? I digress.)

All dry now. This will be mini-ball no. 4 to ply.
After you rinse the spindle and yarn and fibre and set it aside to dry, you start a new project, right?

That's what I did a couple days ago and I think it's my quickest spinning project yet.
My friend gifted me two lovely batts [Rav link] from Sericin Silkworks. 46g of merino, alpaca, silk and yak down.  I decided to play with my homemade top-whorl suspended spindle again.  Finished the first batt of singles in a day. Finished the next batt the following day and started plying.  With baby-chasing and other activities I needed a third to finish plying the 120m of fingering weight yarn.

Tasty new yarn for breakfast.  Sportin' the just-out-of-bed-with-twins look. Chic.
Skeined the yarn around two Bumbos this morning (day 4). Soaked in Euclan. Now it's drying.

Back to the dry silk - the never-ending ounce of thread...

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Spindles


This is my modest spindle collection (not including my simple stick).
On the left are five turkish spindles.  The top is the knit picks version - my first.  The pretty ones are all from Thomas Creations / Threads Thru Time.
The tiny 0.6oz is an orange dymondwood.
The medium 1.3 oz spindle below has a shaft of Argentine Osage Orange and a whorl of Quina (sounds fancy-schmancy).
The large 1.3oz spindle beside it has a walnut shaft and Ambrosia Maple whorl.
The large cobalt blue dymondwood is 1.9oz. (I used to have a matching medium spindle in this wood and it bothers me tremendously that it was lost/stolen.)
On the top right is a homemade top-whorl spindle.
Below it is my supported spindle by Thomas C. Forrester. The woods are Umbuya and maple. It weighs 0.83 oz.
That strange device in the middle is a rakestraw spinner made in Ontario. (Cambridge I believe.)

As you can see, I need to start more spinning projects. I don't know why I have empty spindles.  I am currently working my way through that ounce of silk... it just keeps going.

There is another finished ball missing here.


Silk from SDSpin on etsy


Thursday, January 10, 2013

LYS sale

I had a few xmas dollars to spend.
Wolseley Wools was having a great annual sale.
Wish I had more to spend (and a source of income).
This will keep me happy for a while. Days at least :P


 Sweet Georgia BFL in pomegranate. nom. 8oz to spin


Noro Nadeshiko (with angora, wool and silk) was 50% off.
This was the best colour capture photo, but was part of another picture focused behind the yarn.

Now that I have a new camera, I'll snap those spindle photos and such.  The camera is a point and shoot, so they won't be terribly fancy pics.  With twin infants, we don't have space/arms to carry a larger camera right now.