Yes there really has been spinning going on around here.  Opps knitters are having a Halloween KAL, so I thought I’d join the fun.  I’m thinking some generic fingerless mitts for this yarn.  Eastside Spinners is having a use your handspun SAL/KAL.  So I’m killing 2 birds with one stone with this one .

Color:  Spook from Dragon Fibers, Etsy shop is here

Fiber: Blue Face Leichester – 4 oz Roving

Spun: Supported Long draw

]]> http://ldymstmorn.com/proof-of-spinning/feed 1 http://ldymstmorn.com/a-woolee-winder-for-my-pocket-wheel http://ldymstmorn.com/a-woolee-winder-for-my-pocket-wheel#comments Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:43:33 +0000 marie http://ldymstmorn.com/?p=375

Curiosity got the best of me and as it happens I have a Fricke Woolee Winder.  So I tossed on my pipe to make the bobbin fit, then I tossed on the Woolee Winder (WW) and it didn’t want to work.  The flyer was too far from the bobbin for the gears to mesh.  I sent DH to the Hardware Store one day on a mission, while I was off at a spin in, to find me 2 things, another pipe, same size as the one I already had but shorter, if we had to cut it down, well we could do that and to find me a screw, identical to the one in my WW, he found the screw, but not the pipe.  So off went an email to Doug, maker of the Pocket Wheel to find out where he bought his pipes….he bought them locally, which is not so local for me, about an hour and a half north of me as a matter of fact.  He send me a pipe, 4.5″, and I got it in the mail today.  I tossed that on there, then the WW with the longer screw and started spinning, worked for about 2 min, then the WW lost it’s grip and stop flying.

HMMMMM, now what.  I rememered something from a Ravelry thread about pipe/plumbers tape, it was a Matchless thread to help with clacking as the whorls got older, they loosen up.  Guess what, there was some in my spinning kit, perfect, wrapped that around several times, wanted to add a little “cushion” on there screwed the flyer back on, and yes, I now have a WW that works on my Pocket Wheel , and it spins great, I can’t even feel the added weight of the flyer as I do with some of my other wheels.

The fiber, it’s a Blue Moon Sheep to Shoe kit in one of the Raven Colors – Rook-y.  It really does look mostly black, but i did notice stretch of color as i was plying, so we’ll see what happens to it when i skein it.  There is a bit of a dark dark gray in there and you can see a hint of it in the pic.

Back to playing with my new toy.

Well later that weekend I thought about it some more, which led to me sending an email to Thomas Golding asking about if he could do it and the cost.  I found the cost to be reasonable, considering this was a custom design request.  Well one thing led to another and look what showed up in the mail today:

Whorls 2 3/4″ Cherry Handcarved 5-point star

Style: Aromatherapy

Shaft: Walnut 5/16″ x 8 3/4″

Weight 1.46 oz.

It is absolutely beautiful in it’s simplicity.  The balance is incredible as is the craftmanship.  The spin time….wow, with a flick it’s off and running and i can draft until I am reaching up as far as I can and it hits the ground, which stops the spin of course, but I’m sure if I were taller it would spin longer as it would take longer for it to find the ground .

Yes there has been some knitting and even some finishing, but the 2 fo’s I have are waiting for a dunk and block.  So pics later, well ok as soon as I get over my awe of this spindle, or at least put it down long enough to block the scarf and shawl i’ve finished.

I’m back to spinning.

This last Saturday, I took a little trip up to North Bend (about 50 miles from where I live, on the way to Snoqualmie Pass) to take an advanced drop spindling class with Amelia AKA The Bellwether. 

Forgive the pic, it was after the class was over and we were just kind of milling around, and I thought I need to take at least 1 picture.  I would have taken some earlier but I forgot I had the camera until this point.

Look at all those spindles, yes, during class we were allowed to try any spindle we wanted and use the spindles to learn on .  3 of those spindles made it home with me, pics to follow at a later date…maybe.

So I what did I learn:

1. I learned how to use a Turkish Spindle.  I am even more comfortable using a bottom whorl spindle, which was one of my goals for the class.
2. I learned how to Navajo ply on the drop spindle, it’s tricky, but no where near as complicated as I thought it would be .
3. I learned how to Ply-On-the-Fly, this is a neat bar trick, where you spin your single then navajo ply it before you wind on to the spindle, so when you are done, what comes off your spindle is a finished 3 ply yarn.  I may write it up here once I’m more comfortable with it.

All in all I had a great time, and it was definitely worth the trip out to North Bend to take this class, and I look forward to taking more classes with Amelia, but she’s just a tad farther away, in Sequim WA .  That’s a ferry trip and a floating bridge away, so it’s not exactly easy for me to get out to her LYS to take a class, but I’m thinking I may have to find a way, she is a joy to learn from. And now my addiction to spindling has brought my drop spindle collection up to 26 drop spindles, Amelia says I’m getting to the point where I’m a collector, but I still have a ways to go to catch up to her.

Apparently, my new Rose has been off having some fun when I wasn’t looking, she had a baby!!!  now if only I could figure out who the father is?

Let me introduce Pocket, he’s a Pocket Wheel, and since i’m not very creative and the name fit him, he is hence forth dubbed Pocket.  Yes technically he would be my 6th wheel, but I sold my first wheel, that’s the Louet I sold before we moved back to Washington.  So that would make him my 5th wheel, except….I sold the Lendrum.  Let me say that one again, just a bit more slowly…

I  S O L D  T H E  L E N D R U M!

Sachi, is in the process of buying my Lendrum, well i guess it will be hers soon,  We’re doing a lay-a-way, which will give me a chance to find all those bobbins and drive bands and other pieces. Since I got the Rose, my poor Lendrum, or is that now Sachi’s Lendrum, in any case has been sitting in a corner sulking, he hasn’t had any fiber on him since well since I got the Rose, and Sachi’s been looking for a good 2nd wheel so her Kromski could get a break and not break on her, so the Lendrum is off to a good home.

I’m off to spin, more later when I get back from the Whidbey island spin in.

Here’s a close up

and another

The fiber is from a Totally Tubular Kit that I bought from The Bellwether, the color: well The Colors Purple of course.  This was a totally fun spin and I whipped through 4 oz in just a few days, in between work, knitting and playing with the new car.  I’m spinning up some merino 64′s and I think I’ll do some 2 color knitting with this, the merino is Pewter.

Last weekend my spinning group had it’s 2nd dying session, I didn’t go to the first because the response was overwhelming so a 2nd dye in was created, then it got delayed due to snow, then Madrona, but finally we met to do some dying.

I dyed a Superwash BFL and here are the results.  Unfortunately the weather and day light hours just haven’t been playing well with me, so the colors are fairly close, but not quite true.

Strangely enough I’m been stepping outsize my normal color pallet lately, this one is a bit on the yellow side for what I’d normally go for.

This one, affectionately named Clown Barf by a fellow spinner, is my favorite.  Towards the end of the day, I had one more hang of roving left to dye, and there were lots of left over dyes on the table that were already mixed by everyone.  So I grabbed a cup and a ginormous syringe and started squirting dye zig zag across my roving.  repeated this process through a total of 6 cups of dye.  the first few layers looked a lot like a clown’s wig, hence the name clown barf.  I really love the way it turned out.

Purple Madness, I know the colors don’t quite look purple here but it’s definitely purple.  this one is my 2nd favorite, and like the Clown Barf I can hardly wait to spin it up.

and some purple greens and blues

Sorry for not braiding this one up nice a neatly, but it wasn’t quite dry yet when I took this picture, it’s blacks and magenta and it’s beautiful, but it’s probally less than an ounce of roving, I haven’t weight any of this yet.  It was just a bit of roving that was free floating in my bag of roving.

I started out with 1 lb (16 oz) and just guessed at lengths, I think the first 4 are about 3 – 3.5 oz, again i haven’t weight any of it.

All in all it was a great day and definitely worth the trip out there (100 miles round trip).  Will I do some more dying?  Damn straight, I even have dye powders to dye with.  This is a far cry from dying with Koolaid, i love the depth of the colors so much, I had the whole lot spread across my desk at work for a day. I can’t wait to start spinning some of these, but they’ve got to wait their turn in line, yes, even with 4 wheels, I can’t seem to find a free wheel.  Of course I’ve got a few drop spindles that are bare, but for the larger hanks, that’s a lot of drop spindling, I think i’ll wait for a free wheel.  No I’m not going to buy another one….I think, for a while.

This is a Superwash Corridale, I started out with about 8 oz, what you are seeing is 6.8 oz, approximately 396 yards, and it’s 3 ply.  Colors are not very true, but it’s late and it’s dark out, to lazy to clear a space near the natural light lamp, it’s pretty much buried deep.  This is about 16 or 17 wpi, so about a sports weight.  The fiber is from the Hello Yarn Fiber Club, about 3 or 4 months ago, and the color way is “Toxic”, purples, whites, oranges, reds and some browns even.  This is destined to be at least 1 pair of socks for yours truly.  Oh this was spun on my Lendrum, and now I have 3 wheels free, so I’m off to throw one of my Sheep 2 Shoe kits on the Rose.

Silly me, went and bought yet another wheel this weekend, the Majacraft Rose.  No worries, I didn’t go for any long drives, I bought the wheel from a friend, who isn’t quite as happy with it as she though she would be.  It’s a wheel I’ve been looking at for a while now and was planning on buying in a few months anyway, so now I don’t have to.

Pictures?  What are those?  there are some of the new wheel around here somewhere, I know DH took some, but  if you want to see the new wheel in the mean time, you can see some here, it’s the one with the rose engraved on it.

 Oh yeah and some flooding, not at my house, but in the neigborhood.  As of this morning, there are very limited routes for me to take to get to work.  All alternate routes are currently flooded, one of them is a small city and I haven’t yet taught my car to swim.

 On the knitting front, I’ve now finished 3.5 pairs of clogs, 1.5 more go go. one side of the Celtic Tote is finished, 1/4 of the sleeve on one of the Tomten jackets is done, and half way through the body of the other one.  Hopefully I’ll have everything that needs to be felted done this weekend or the next, so it all has a chance to dry. Toss in a BSJ, that I have to finish tonight (baby shower is tomorrow, but in my defense it keeps changing on me, it may not be tomorrow when tomorrow comes, we’ll see what happens). 

On the spinning front, my Spinning group met at one of the ladies houses this last Saturday, so we got to spin in a nice cozy living room, with a big picture window, watching the snow fall.  It fell, accumulated to about 2-3 inches or so, then melted away overnight, and gave way to rain, rain, and more rain, resulting in the flooding mentioned above.  Our house is high and dry, though there were complexes down the street from us that weren’t so lucky. But I digress, spinning oh yeah, total skeins that need to pose for the camera is somewhere around 5 or 6 (I think).  Another one of the ladies in my spinning group carded up a bunch of rolags, and I mean a bunch, and gave us all a lesson in English Long Draw.  All in all a great time was had by all. 

Back to the grind, maybe after I finish the BSJ, I’ll actually do a photo shoot with all those skeins of yarn.