A Reckoning

I haven't touched my Waiting for Rain since the weekend because I've been hoping that the amount of yarn I have left will somehow have magically multiplied in my project bag, resulting in my having enough to finish the lace edging. Alas, that has not happened. So tonight, I'll be ripping back what I've done this far and starting (if not finishing) a plain bind off. I'm disappointed, obviously, because I really liked how the edging was looking, but there's really no solution here other than to rip back. I'm not going to buy another skein of yarn to do half a bind off, and I don't have anything in my stash that looks close enough to finish it with. If there's any silver lining in this situation, it's that I should finish the shawl with very minimal leftovers and maximizing this project's Stash Dash contribution.

On the plus side, I have finished two things in the past couple of days. First, there's my skein of corespun that I started on Sunday. I now feel I've mastered this technique, and I also busted another 4 oz. of fiber from my stash.

When I say this skein is finished, that's with a caveat. You can see just from the picture that there's quite a bit of excess twist in the yarn, despite my best efforts to counteract it by adding twist to my core. I guess there's wasn't enough, so the yarn is twisting up on itself pretty aggressively. I'm likely going to run this back through the wheel quickly to get rid of some of that twist, though I'll have to be careful that the wrap doesn't unwrap itself from the core in the process. I was pretty rough with the skein when I washed it, so I'm hoping the wrap has fulled a bit to itself and to the core.

I also finished my double-knit cowl:

I was surprised how quickly this knit up, given that I really was only working on it during the workweek while on my lunch break. This will be getting blocked and photographed this weekend so I can get the pattern off to my tech editor.

One last Tour de Fleece spin remains on the wheel, and it's my Sheep to Shoe kit. I highly doubt I'll finish it by the end of the Tour, but perhaps it'll get done by the end of the month. It has been good to spin some deep stash and feel like I'm making progress in cleaning things out. Baby steps, right? Once I do finish, I'll still have the other half of the fiber to deal with, plus the second S2S kit still in stash, so it's not like I'm going to run out of fiber to spin anytime soon!

Two-Thirds

We are now through two weeks of the Tour de Fleece, and I have a second finished skein. I've had better output in years past, but I'm still pretty satisfied with what I've gotten done over the past two weeks.

The finished skein is a Bond/Suri alpaca blend from Southern Cross Fibre. I split the top in half lengthwise and then split one half in half again for a fractal spin. My finished yarn is a two-ply light fingering that's approximately 416 yards.

There was a lot of orange in the fiber, so I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about the finished yarn, but I surprised myself by absolutely loving it.

I've still got some superwash merino on my Lendrum, but today, while the Mister and Rainbow went to a water park with some friends, I decided to do something a little more challenging. I missed the first challenge day (and by "missed" I mean I knew it was challenge day but pretty much ignored it), and as today was the second one, it seemed an appropriate day to do something a bit outside my comfort zone.

It's been several years since my first attempt at core spinning. It's a fun technique and one that I wasn't great at the first time I tried it (as you'd expect the first time doing anything). I also had this sparkly merino blended top that I won in the Tour last year from FatCatKnits that was just begging to become corespun:

The last time around, I only had one wheel. This time, I thought the miniSpinner might actually be the better tool because I could set it to a relatively low speed that would stay constant so I could focus on what my hands are doing.

The first step was to add some twist to the core; with core spinning, there's usually no plying, so if you want your yarn to be moderately balanced, some twist needs to be added to the core that will be lost when it's wrapped. I used some leftover Knit Picks laceweight from years ago and ran it quickly through my miniSpinner and onto a bobbin.

Then I prepped the fiber by splitting it into fourths and then stripping each piece into four lengths to make the fiber easier to manage and easier to draft. To core spin, you hold the fiber perpendicular to the core and allow it to wrap around the core. Here you can see what it looks like:

While my yarn isn't completely consistent because I clearly haven't entirely mastered the technique, I felt a lot more comfortable doing it this time around. I'm roughly halfway done and will do a little more this evening with the hope of finishing up tomorrow. Then I'll be fairly rough with the skein when I wash it in order to full the yarn a bit (that'll help the wrap stay on the core better). Now that I have a better feel for core spinning, I predict you'll be seeing it more from me!

For the Heck of It

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is the SpinDoctor podcast. Sasha's 'cast is great for new and experienced spinners alike, as it's filled with great reviews as well as discussions of her own spinning. So when she announced that she was hosting a spinalong of art yarns to go along with Jacey Boggs' book Spin Art, I thought I'd spin along for a bit.

Normally, I'm not that into art yarns; I can appreciate how interesting and pretty they can be, but I've never spun any myself because I don't know what I'd knit with such yarns (not that I end up knitting that much of the yarn I spin anyway!). There were a few yarns in the book that I wanted to try however. The first was a cabled yarn, which I did last month with a Crown Mountain Farms club shipment. Another was a corespun yarn, which is the most recent thing off my wheel:

The core was a bit of fiber leftover from last year's sweater project; I spun it, with lots of extra twist, in the direction I normally ply so that I could do the wrapping in the direction I normally spin my singles. For a corespun yarn, you hold the fiber perpendicular to the core so that it can literally wrap around the core. This means that some twist is introduced as the core is wound on, so you need more twist than usual in the core so that the yarn is balanced in the end. For the wrap, I dug deep into my stash and found some colonial wool top from Paradise Fibers that I bought for practice (and evidently never used) when I first got my Lendrum four years ago.

This skein is about 111 yards and pretty wildly inconsistent -- not surprising, given how awkward the process felt the whole time -- but it's pretty well balanced and fairly soft, so I'm pretty happy with it. I still, however, have no idea what to do with this yarn! I didn't love corespinning, but I suspect that's mainly because it felt so awkward; it's hard to love something that's hard. I'd be willing to give it another try -- eventually. For now, I am spinning up the rest of this colonial top into my usual yarn (I started with 8 oz., so this'll make a good dent in my stash).

Leftovers Spinning

Maryland Sheep and Wool is now less than a month away, and I'm planning on buying some more fiber to spin there (mostly in the form of a fleece), so I thought it would be a good idea to finish spinning what I bought at the festival last year before I acquire anything additional. For nearly a year, I'd had a bundle of Cormo top shoved in the back of my closet; I'd started spinning it at the festival on the Jenkins Turkish spindle I bought the same day but never made much headway. This week I put it on the wheel.

It's a little hard to tell from the picture, but this is some pretty uneven yarn. Cormo is a very fine wool, so it gets neppy and felty easily. I thought the fiber was a real steal at $4/ounce, and I'm seeing that you get what you pay for. The prep on this fiber wasn't great, meaning it was difficult to get a really consistent yarn, but it wasn't horrible either. I decided to go with the flow and enjoy the experience as much as I could. The color is great and it's very soft, so the finish yarn should be nice. I finished up the second bobbin this afternoon while Rainbow was napping and will ply later this week.

While the singles are resting on the bobbins, I decided to challenge myself and spin an art yarn. I had a small amount (probably less than an ounce) of fiber leftover from my sweater spin last year that I knew I was never going to use for anything really because it was so rough. I hate to waste fiber, though, so I figured it would be perfect for the core of a corespun yarn. I spun the singles up quickly last week with lots of extra twist, and this afternoon I started "plying" with some Colonial wool top I've had for probably as long as I've been spinning.

Apologies for the dark photo -- using the flash was the only way to get the camera to focus and really show the yarn! This is definitely a spinning technique that's outside my comfort zone, but I'm enjoying it!