Washed those BFL skeins in Eucalan and was amazed at the amount of dirt that came out.
This delightfully Heath Robinson arrangement of chairs on the kitchen table is intended to dry the skeins in plenty of air and under slight tension. The skeins are hanging from a length of curtain pole and I have my clothes line prop threaded through the bottom of the skeins to add a little weight tension.
The cats enjoyed this arrangement…
The weather has remained very dark and dismal and no decent photos of yesterday’s parcel are available yet. However…
With the aid of the on-camera flash unit – some evidence that we are running some kind of a colour theme just now. This is the Aurora scarf alongside the merino/tussah silk roving.
Not dissimilar, I think.
Of course, having draped the fibre on the wheel, I appear to have more justification for the claim that I am now A Spinner, because, well, I just could not resist having a little go, could I?
And, of course, a little go soon escalated into a goodly portion of the afternoon, and before I knew it… a half bobbin full!
This roving is exactly what I needed to counteract all those long weeks of concentrating on spinning the uniformly brown BFL in, er, uniform fashion. It’s colourful and joyous and I elected to make a wholly exuberant yarn this time. I just threw it at the wheel and didn’t care what came out, telling myself that lumpy bumpy was what I wanted…
Except for one or two little matters, like my innate parsimony coming to the fore – I kept slipping back to fine and even spinning (yardage, yardage, YARDAGE! my inner meanie kept on telling me) – and the fact that I was just not taking care, it all went in rather thrilling fashion.
Somewhere before the point at which I finished yesterday, I concluded that just chucking it at the wheel was not particularly constructive. I realised I could still gain a random lumpy bumpy yarn if I took control of the spinning. Slowly, I developed a technique of creating slubs and thin patches – and I continued with this today on the second half of the bobbin, which is now filled.
I have no idea what I am doing, it must be said. I really don’t know if my technique would be an approved one, but I seem to have gained control by using a combination draw method. A relaxed backwards draw gives me an even single, rather fatter than I have been spinning in the last few months. I use a forwards draw to pull out a slub, and a kind of backwards-and-forwards draw teases out a fine single to either side of the slubs. That’s the theory anyway, and it is becoming increasingly consistent as I go.
It is giving me the horrors. This isn’t cheap roving – it’s 30% Tussah Silk with 70% Merino. And here I am distressing it, deliberately. It won’t be good for knitting anything very much when I have finished. It’s wasteful, but its fun – and it is a very good antidote to all that rigorous spinning on the BFL.
So I have decided that, if nothing else, it will make a (very expensive) nice textural wall piece. The colours are good, nothing like they look in these first images (due to flash) but this picture shows them up quite well – they mute once spun. Truly gorgeous.
Really, this spin is a joyous experience. There is a stormy skies blue in the roving that fills me with deep joy each time I come to it. It is a thrilling colour.
I am hoping to complete the roving this weekend. If I can do that, I shall be well impressed with myself. And, really, I can’t wait to see how this turns out! Perhaps the cost of 100 gms of roving is a small price to pay for two days’ entertainment value?
Today
Today did not see as much spinning done as I would have wished. It has been an odd kind of day. Bianca went to her new home, the garage door got fixed, and the heating oil arrived. I cooked some Pollock Florentine and washed the silk that I spun the other day, and did a lot of cleaning and tidying that included washing a whole heap of rubber stamps that had been waiting for attention for months. Poor Mr L had a fiasco of a day that included a conference phone meeting disrupted by dogs “greeting” the oil man (very loudly) and the ringing of hidden telephones. He’s mildly embarrassed, but overjoyed to have found a home for Bianca and to have more space in his garage – not to mention being able to drive cars in and out of it once more. We’ll skip over the news from the meeting, and the indications of “redeployment” and “retraining” – because I really do not want to think about being forced away from this idyllic island existence.
Perhaps the weekend will be calmer.
The BIG activity around here just now is the final push on a long standing web project that is eating up ALL our spare time: www.weatherfaqs.org.uk We are currently link checking and repairing and are on page 142 of two hundred and odd pages. There’s a long way to go, but we hope to finish essential works by the end of this weekend. (and I don’t want to think how much non-essential-but-desirable work remains to be done)
It had just better not get in the way of my beautiful roving!
Also by the end of the weekend, I hope to have identified and cast on a pattern for my BFL. I am not receiving any assistance with that, no matter how many pleas I make… so, if you know of a suitable shawl or stole for 1500 yards of light fingering – PLEASE leave a comment!