Tag Archives: spinning

Mittens, part twee

knitting, , , ,

Well, I ran out of yarn right at the end, but managed to bind off the fingers. However, I was still left with thumb holes. Faced with the choice of waiting until I could get back to the yarn store and having mittens right now, but with different colored thumbs, my daughter decided color contrast was good.

The end result is funky, but sort of cute. I had just a couple options, since I left the vast majority of my stash back in Florida.

The interesting this here is that this white yarn (that my daughter picked) is actually some that I spun myself, and this is the first time that I have put any yarn I’ve spun to real use. The mitten yarn is DK weight, but the homespun is…. thick. The end result, after a lot of cursing while trying to knit 2 stitches together over and over (I actually bent one of my needles a little – those puny size 3s just couldn’t handle my fearsome yarn!) was having really thick, dense mitten thumbs. I’m going to spin this as a good thing – extra protection against the cold while making snow balls!

Lessons learned: You CAN switch up a needle size (or two… or four) in the middle of a project if your needles are too small. For the thumbs, once I switched up to size 7, things went much better. Plus, at least in this case, you can’t tell when I made the switch. My other lesson? Sadly, I think it is “Always buy an extra skein” – I am going to be able to make a heck of a scrap blanket very soon, I suspect!

Resume spinning

Spinning,

After a brief, frustration-related hiatus, I have returned to spinning. Everything was going so well with my beginner roving, but when I tried to pretend I could really spin it all fell apart. (Literally.) Luckily, my friend and fellow spinning novice could see what the problem was: I was trying to spin roving that was too thick. Turns out beginner roving is already thin enough to spin, but grown-up roving is meant for people who know enough to pull apart the roving into thinner strips. People who were not me, but now are me, because now I know to do this!

And the magical process by which stringy fluff becomes yarn can continue…

So, I’m now figuring out how to spin steadily, instead of parking the spindle to twist the fiber. While it is more of a juggling act (and so I’m sure much more entertaining to watch), the quality of the yarn is surprisingly better – my width is a lot more consistent and I over-spin much less.

Also, my friend now has a spinning wheel. As I told Redbeard about this, I made to sure to reassure him that I’m not ready for a wheel yet. He replied that he has already “resigned” himself to making room for one. So…. does that mean I can have one now? Because I think I really am ready.

 

Feeling All Spindly

knitting, ,

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine and I were talking about how fun it would be to learn how to spin, and now, lo and behold, we spin! She invited a veteran spinner (and spinning teacher) to our small knitting group (average size = 4) and away we went. Our teacher was great: patient, low-key and, most importantly, patient. I came away with a spindle of a pretty green and surprisingly yarn-like substance:

The stuff on the right is what I spun. Me! And it started like the stuff on the left! It was kind of magical. It even – and this is the importantly part -continued to work outside of the knitting group. Amazing! Why am I still sitting here typing when I could go spin?