On Pace

While I haven't been spinning up my fleece as much as I would like in the past week, I have made some some decent progress. I have gotten through 8 ounces so far (the three bobbins' worth you see here, plus once batch of singles still resting on the bobbin).

I've found that in the same amount of time that it took me spin an ounce last year on the Lendrum, I can spin two ounces on the miniSpinner. If that continues to be true, I should be able to get through the same amount of fiber in half the time. Of course, last year I was spinning an ounce almost every day; this year, I've only sat down to spin three or four times, so technically I think I'd need to spin more often to keep up the pace. Regardless, I'm pretty much on track with where I was last year, so I think it's reasonable to think that I'll have a sweater's worth of yarn within a month or so.

One of the reasons that I didn't get as much done as I was hoping is because I had to finish up a project that when on the wheel just before the holidays and was finished up when we got back from our trip. This was the December 2011 All Spun Up spinalong, a gorgeous 50% merino/50% tencel blend in a colorway called Water Lilies. For speed's sake, I decided to spin the fiber in one go and chain ply it -- I even spun the singles a little thicker than usual so it wouldn't take forever. The resulting yarn is what you see here:

As I was plying, I realized that it took me a little while to successfully spin a little thicker -- my first several yards of singles were much thinner than the rest, so evidently I had difficulty spinning anything thicker than my usual! In any case, most of the yarn is roughly DK weight, and the skein is 207 yards.

You can see in the difference between the two photos how difficult this blend can be to photograph -- the shine of the tencel really throws the color off! I haven't thought much about it yet, but I think this yarn will need to turn into some sort of neck accessory with a lot of drape. Eventually, of course. There's plenty of fiber to spin and plenty of handspun to knit still in the stash!