Rapprochement

On Friday night, my miniSpinner and I finally made peace again. If you recall, I had the less-than-brilliant idea to clean the WooLee Winder on it during the Tour de Fleece, just before I was intending to start spinning the yarn that I hoped to use for my Ravellenic Games project, and the result was that I messed it up somehow. Although I did eventually get it back in working order, it never felt quite the same to me, so I'd been avoiding it for months.

On Friday, though, I had finished spinning up some fluffy woolen singles on my Lendrum that I knew I'd have to ply on the miniSpinner (the finished yarn would never fit on one Lendrum bobbin), so I decided it was high time I finished up that bobbin of yarn. I'm happy to say that I met that goal:

This was some turquoise merino top that I hand blended (rather roughly, I should add) with some silk sliver. Originally I thought I'd wind off what was on this bobbin and ply from both ends, but I like the look of this so much that I think I may just blend the rest of the fiber and do a proper two ply. The rough blending means that the yarn is tweedy and a little rough/rustic, which I'm actually really liking.

Before I can get to that, though, I'm plying up those woolen singles, spun from last month's Crown Mountain Farms fiber club shipment of 4 oz. of Clun Forest roving.

This colorway is called Catman (aka, Klaus's alter ego on Ravelry), and I thought this shipment would be a good excuse to practice my long draw. It's clear my technique still needs some practice (my singles are not very consistent), but it was such a nice change to be able to fill a bobbin in just a little more than an hour. I've plied up about half of it so far and hope to finish the rest tonight.

Now that the miniSpinner and I are friends again, I think it's high time I spin up some larger batches of fiber -- and there's certainly enough of it in my stash!