This Lady Knits

I know it’s been quite a while since I’ve last posted, but guess what, I didn’t fall off the face of the planet, and yes I actually remembered to bring my camera.  There has been some knitting, and even an FO, I just need to take a picture of it, but I’m knitting away at my Mother’s day present, Gust, I missed it by a scant 3 repeats, mom loves it though, more on that later when it’s done.  Most of all there has been spinning at my house, I’ll fess up to all that in a later post, and post some eye candy, it’s been a while since I’ve posted any hand spun, and the wheels, oh do I have a bit to catch up on there.

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.