Double Oops

This post is all about small mistakes.

The first oops is that this post is being published this morning rather than last night. Rainbow turned 3 on Saturday, which is somewhat irrelevant except for the fact that she agreed to give up her pacifier when she turned 3. That meant that yesterday was the first day and night without it. She refused to take a nap, so I had her around all yesterday afternoon (though I will say that she was pretty cooperative and played quietly, which enabled me to get some knitting done and wash some fleece), but the real challenge was going to bed last night. Without something in her mouth to soothe her, she was a bit of a basket case (I'm sure the lack of nap didn't help things). I had to sit with her and pat her back until she fell asleep, which meant by the time I managed to escape from her room, I was beat and forgot to post.

So this morning I'll have to show you what I've been spinning, and you'll have to forgive me for this dark photo snapped with my phone this morning (it was dark and rainy yesterday anyway, so you wouldn't have gotten a much better shot had I remembered to take one with the good camera yesterday).

This is some Yarn Hollow alpaca/merino/silk that I picked up at the fiber tasting at my LYS several months ago. As you would expect with this blend, it's soft and slippery, and it wants to be spun very fine. I'm spinning it from one end of the top to the other, and I'll chain ply to preserve the color sequence.

If you look closely at this photo, you'll see my second oops. When I spin on my Lendrum, I have no problem remembering which direction the wheel should go to spin singles versus ply. On my miniSpinner, however, I have to flip a switch to tell it which direction to spin. I made a rookie mistake when I started spinning this fiber, because I'd just finished plying up some yarn and forgot to flip the switch back to the other direction. By the time I realized my error, I'd already spun enough singles that I didn't want waste them (or deal with the hassle of winding them off and reversing the twist, which might have been a futile effort anyway), so I just kept going and I'll ply in the opposite direction. I figure that, at the very least, the resulting yarn will be a good experiment in seeing whether how I knit has any bearing on the twist in the yarn.