The Sounds of Silence

Well, she's gone. We put Rainbow on the bus to camp this morning, and so for the next two weeks (well, the next 12 days, anyway), the house will be unusually quiet.

I did, however, get lots of extra time with her, including the entire day on Friday. I told her we could do whatever she wanted, which turned out to be watching a lot of TV (presumably in preparation for not being able to watch it for quite a while). That gave me lots of extra time at my wheel, and that enabled me to finish up my spin in progress.

I couldn't be more pleased with how this turned out. This skein combined two different batches of fiber (one Polwarth/silk, one Targhee/bamboo/silk) in similar colors. I created, in effect, a four-ply yarn by doing an alternating chain ply. This structure is a bit hard to explain, so bear with me here. To chain ply, you essentially create a crochet chain with long loops and add twist. This enables you to create a three-ply yarn from one single/strand. For an alternating chain ply, you still create the loops but also hold an additional strand alongside it, and you alternate which strand you grab to form the next loop. The finished yarn is fingering weight (which gives you a true sense of how fine my singles were!) and approximately 320 yards.

Though I have a lot of knitting to do right now, I do feel like spinning more on the weekends, so I almost immediately started a new project. I pulled out some BFL from Fibernymph Dye Works that I won as a prize sometime last year, I think, and decided to spin it all onto one bobbin and ply it back on itself for a quick-and-dirty two ply.

To make things even quicker, I'm spinning it mostly supported long draw, so my singles are a bit fuzzy. I feel like I've hardly spent any time on this, and yet I'd say I'm already two-thirds of the way done with the singles. Here is the gratuitous bobbin shot:

My spinning area also underwent a minor makeover this weekend, with some help from Rainbow. The utility cart I ordered arrived, so I took it as the perfect opportunity to clean up the area, throw some things away, and generally organize my spinning things. Now I have a neater corner, even if it isn't quite a cozy as it could be (that will come, once the new chair arrives).

Here's a close-up of the cart itself:

There are various tools and such in the top drawer, which has a removable cover that doubles as a surface for my miniSpinner to sit on, and all my lazy kates and extra bobbins fit in the other two. This purchase was worth every penny!