Oops! I Did It Again

Remember how when I finished my last skein of handspun, I said I'd overestimated just how fine I needed to spin my singles? Well, it appears I am the proverbial old dog who can't learn new tricks.

This is the Crown Mountain Farms Polwarth that I'd been spinning as the compliment to the really bright and colorful skein for Rainbow's bat mitzvah tallit. It was the most sedate fiber we found in my stash, at least of the stuff that was dyed, and I still have no recollection of why I bought it. Unlike the previous spin, this one had no silk in it, so you would have thought that it would have been a little more of a challenge to get a really fine yarn. But no:

From 4 oz. of fiber, I have approximately 778 yards of two-ply heavy lace weight. I am still astonished by that number. And I'm also thankful I had my Super Skeiner when it came time to wind it off, because I think I would have damaged my shoulder had I had to do it using a niddy noddy and very likely would have lost count while winding (there were 459 wraps, in case you were wondering). I still need to dig out my Zoom Loom and weave up a little sample with the two yarns to get Rainbow's approval, but I think the skeins look really nice together:

Because I am not a weaver, I'm not sure which yarn would be better for warp and which for weft, but I think the darker skein will tone down the colors in the other skein and give a colorful but muted fabric. And I think there's certainly enough yardage -- more than 1,400 yards in total!

Up next, I've started a project to spin for a sweater. Mary and I have decided to to a little knitalong together of Andrea Mowry's Shifty pullover. The pattern calls for Spincycle yarn, which is (in my opinion) absurdly expensive, most of all because I can spin yarn that looks pretty much the same. So that is what I'm going to do. I have started with my most recent Southern Cross Fibre club shipment, a colorway called Dark Ocean on gray Merino. I'm spinning a traditional three ply and started the first bobbin yesterday:

This colorway is a semisolid, so I just split the fiber into thirds, but for the other colorways, I'll be going for a Spincycle-eque look and dividing different colors or shades for different plies (much like I did with this skein). I am going to need quite a lot of yarn for this project, but I have quite a few colorways from SCF with shades of blue, so while it may take a while to get all the yarn spun up, it will be a good stash-busting project.

I hope those of you who are celebrating Mother's Day today have an enjoyable day. For those of you for whom this is a tough day, I send you love.

Right on Track

Spinning progress has been a little slower than in the past, but I'm still on track (at least as far as I'm concerned) with the spinning for Rainbow's tallit. Thanks in large part to a virtual spinning meet-up yesterday afternoon, I've officially passed the halfway point on the FatCatKnits Polwarth/silk singles. I had split the fiber into four strips and am now on the third of them.

I have also pulled out the other color that we have been entertaining as a pairing for this brighter colorway, and it's from very deep stash. It's Polwarth from Crown Mountain Farms, which closed down a number of years ago (I think, in fact, that this might've been from the last order I placed when they announced they were closing).

It's actually a bit darker in real life than it's appearing here (I was getting a bit of a glare from the window), but at least you can see the hints of pink and purple and orange that I think will play nicely with the colors in the brighter Polwarth/silk.

For those of you who, like me, are fans of HipStrings and are thinking ahead to the Tour de Fleece, I wanted to mention that Jill has made available some really intriguing batt options for TdF this year. I decided on the "personal favorites" option, and I'm really excited to see what she comes up with!

On the Silk Road

Earlier in the week, I finished plying the skein of yarn I'd been spinning for the past couple of weeks. It took me two evenings to ply, and not full evenings at that, so you can imagine my surprise when I was winding off the plied yarn and realized that I had a ton of yardage -- 525 yards, to be exact.

This started as Corriedale pencil roving in Silk Road from the now-defunct Crown Mountain Farms, one of my favorite dyers. I'm not exactly sure what inspired me to buy this colorway, as it's not really my colors, but it was an effortless spin -- and I still have half of the original fiber. This skein will be going into the sale bin; I'm not sure if I've mentioned it on the blog, but I'll be vending again at Indie Knit and Spin this year. I'll just be selling handspun this year, so I'm trying to increase my inventory of sock yarn. The next skein is already more than halfway done:

This is superwash BFL from Spunky Electic in a Lame Duck Mallard. It's also a deep stash spin. Wanna know how old this fiber is? I won it as a door prize at a spin-in during the 2009 Tour de Fleece, when I was pregnant with Rainbow. That's some old fiber! Luckily it still spins beautifully. The fiber is actually a little slippery, to the point that it actually feels like there's some silk content in it. I'm already more than halfway done with the singles, so I expect you'll see this in skein form by next weekend.

Some more fiber for the stash arrived unexpectedly this week:

This was a prize pack from David of Southern Cross Fibre for my Tour de Fleece participation. It's a little wool sampler (110 g of fiber), and other than the general fiber content, I have no idea what each little bundle is (though the one in the bottom right looks familiar). I might end up spinning these up as mini skeins, which would be a fun spinning refresher between larger skeins.

Faster by the Day, Slower by the Week

Have you ever heard the saying that spindle spinning is slower by the hour but faster by the week, or something like that? The idea is that you don't spin a whole lot of yarn on a spindle in any one spinning session, but the amount you spin adds up over time because the spindle is so portable and you can keep it with you to spin when you find a few free minutes here or there

With the spinning project I've been working on (on the wheel, mind you), I feel like it's been just the opposite. I've been spinning pencil roving, which feels like it spins very quickly because it's such a thin strip of fiber, but then it seems to take forever because there's so much of it. I started this spin two weeks ago, and I've only just finished the bobbin of singles.

Granted, I did not spin much at all this past week, so it's probably not a huge shock that it took me as long as it did to spin these singles. I guess I've come to expect more of myself because I was spinning a three-ply fingering skein in a week earlier in the summer (though that was probably during the Tour de Fleece when I was doing a lot more spinning). In any case, I'll let this rest overnight and probably start plying tomorrow. And I'll feel very happy to have spun some very deep stash -- I can't even remember how long ago I bought this fiber, but the dyer has been out of business for at least two years now and this was one of my earlier orders from them, so it's got to be several years at least!

The Polwarth Poof

Remember how I was anticipating that my rainbow skein of Polwarth was going to poof up in the wash? It did indeed, though I didn't really expect how much it would poof.

To measure how much yardage I have, I first count the number of wraps around my 2 yd. niddy noddy and make a note of it. For this particular skein, I got exactly 300 wraps. I always assume there's going to be a bit less than twice the number of wraps, because I do wrap under a bit of tension, but I frequently find that my yarns shrink up even more once they're washed, as the moisture allows the memory and the spring to come back into the fibers. This is even more pronounced with fine wools like merino, Targhee, and Polwarth, and usually with those wools the skein not only shrinks up in length, but the yarn itself plumps up considerably. The rainbow yarn was light fingering fresh off the wheel, but after a wash, it plumped up to sport verging on DK in some areas.

To measure my final yardage, I measured the length of the open skein, multiplied that number by two (for the full length around the skein), and multiplied that number by the number of wraps around the niddy noddy. Finally, I divided that big number by 36 to get the total number of yards. If I'd calculated my yardage simply by multiplying the number of wraps on my niddy noddy by two, I'd have gotten 600 yards. However, taking into account the poof and the resulting shrinkage, I ended up with approximately 433 yards -- that's a pretty significant difference.

My one little complaint about this yarn is that the red bled a bit into some of the other colors when I washed it, which you can see if you look closely in this picture:

I'm hoping the bleeding won't bee too apparent when this yarn is actually knit up (into what, I just don't know yet, though I'm thinking some kind of big, poofy cowl). I joked on Ravelry that I'm tempted to just wear this bright skein around my neck and call it a day.

I so enjoyed the boost I got from these bright colors that I picked another colorful bundle of fiber (part of my last order from Crown Mountain Farms) for my next spin. I'm spinning a three-ply fingering weight, my default yarn, on my Lendrum, and I'm nearly halfway done with the singles. This is the second bobbin.

The color repeats on the fiber are very short, as you can see, and there are quite a lot of colors, so it'll be really interesting to see how this yarn looks when plied. I really can't wait to see if I end up with the same variation in color or if it all mixes so much that the colors cancel each other out and I end up with a neutral, so I anticipate a fair amount of spinning this week.

All the Colors of the Rainbow

As I had hoped, I managed to finish spinning up the third and final bobbin of my rainbow fiber on Friday night, which meant that last night when I sat down to spin, it was time for a marathon plying session. (Luckily I had my miniSpinner at the ready, so at least most of the work was done for me.) I didn't finish up until after 11, which is rather late for me, so I saved skeining and washing for this morning. Alas, it's a dark, damp day here and the skein is still drying, so you'll have to make do with a couple of prewash shots.

First, here's the whole thing on the bobbin -- a sight that makes me very glad that I have these enormous WooLee Winder bobbins:

And here it is skeined up on my niddy noddy:

It really did turn out exactly as I was hoping -- there just a bit of overlap from one color to the next, but I finished with just a little bit of singles on two bobbins when the first ran out, so I split my colors pretty well and spun them fairly consistently.

I won't know exactly how much yardage I ended up with until the skein is fully dry and I can measure it, but I had 300 wraps on my niddy noddy, so even accounting for shrinkage, I'm hopeful I'll have somewhere in the 500 yard range. This is Polwarth, so it should fluff up a bit from the wash, but it looks to be fingering weight.

After all that color, I was craving some more, so I pulled out this Crown Mountain Farms superwash merino (from my very last CMF order) and am spinning up some three-ply sock yarn.

I have caught the spinning bug once again, so I wouldn't be surprised if you see this as yarn in another week or two!

Disproportionate Fiber Flow

Considering that my default spinning is very fine (usually a three-ply fingering weight), it always amazes me how quickly it can go when I'm spinning much thicker singles. You may recall that last week I showed you most of the singles spun up from some of the fiber I bought at MDSW. I finished the second (and final) bobbin that evening, and on Friday night I plied, basically in one sitting. I ended up with approximately 184 yards of two-ply worsted weight (it came off the bobbin looking slightly finer than that but puffed up nicely in its bath).

I'm quite delighted with this yarn. I split the fiber for a fractal yarn -- I split it in half lengthwise and then split one of the halves in half again -- so it should stripe a bit when knit up. This will eventually be come a hat or mittens for Rainbow for next year; she can get away with the bright colors at her age.

If I could keep spinning things this fast, I'd make a pretty big dent in my spinning stash. I may have to start doing that soon, because a big box arrived on Friday from Crown Mountain Farms with my last (sob!) order. I had enough trouble deciding between colors that I ended up ordering them all in 4 oz. amounts. Are you ready for picture overload? Here we go.

Superwash merino in San Francisco Nights:

Blue Hotel:

and Material Girl:

Polwarth in Black Sun:

Eternity:

and Hymne An Die Nacht:

And finally BFL in Buttercup Yellow:

I'd really like to start spinning all of these right away, but I feel like I should save them and savor them because they're the last I'll ever get.

In Training

The Tour de Fleece starts toward the end of the month, and considering how little I touched my wheels during the last month (when I was so focused on knitting), I thought I should spend some time getting back into the "spin" of things so I'll be ready for the serious spinning the Tour requires. After finishing up the cabled yarn last week, I thought I should start working through my MDSW purchases.

I started with this Fiber Optic merino/silk gradient.

A gradient like this of course begs to be chain plied to preserve the color changes, so I started with the orange end and began spinning very fine singles on my miniSpinner. I've put it a decent amount of time during the past week, including about three hours on Friday (I had the day off and was dealing with what may have been a migraine rebound headache for much of the day, so it was good to just sit and spin). As of yesterday, I'd gotten into the beginning of the blue. Unfortunately, the color is not showing accurately here; it's a much deeper purple/blue. I'm hoping to finish spinning the singles in the next couple of days so I can let the bobbin rest before I start plying.

This afternoon, a friend came over to spin for a bit. It wasn't practical to bring the miniSpinner downstairs and try to run the cord across the room, so I got out the Lendrum and this BFL from Gale's Art that also came home with me from MDSW.

I bought this with Rainbow in mind, and I decided to split it for a fractal spin. My thought was that these bright colors would be perfect for a winter hat and/or mittens. I'm spinning it up significantly thicker than the Fiber Optic braid, so it's no surprise that in three hours of spinning, I got through about a bobbin and a half.

I love instant gratification spinning!

Before I go, a final word (really more of a public service announcement). If you've been reading this blog for any length of time and paid attention to my spinning posts, then you know that Crown Mountain Farms is one of my favorite purveyors of fiber. We found out this week that Klaus, the owner and dyer, is quitting the business to move back to Germany to be near his parents. The online business is for sale, but after the end of the month, Klaus's gorgeous colorways will no longer be available. I already placed a pretty decently sized order, but if you've been considering making a purchase, I'd advise you to do it now. CMF's fibers are always wonderfully prepped. and Klaus's color sense is amazing. I've never been disappointed with anything I've ordered from CMF and will certainly miss them.

So Many Steps

I finally finished a skein of yarn this week that really should have been done quite a while ago (I blame the Mad May knitalong). In reality, it probably didn't take as long to spin as I think, but because this is the second yarn I've spun from the same fiber (Crown Mountain Farms corriedale pencil roving in Eire), it feels like I've been working on it for months. In any case, here it is:

This is a cabled yarn, which means it's a yarn made of plied yarns that are plied together. This particular skein is a 2x2 cabled yarn. I split my approximately 4 oz. of fiber into quarters and spun four bobbins of singles. Then I plied two bobbins' worth together twice (so I had two bobbins of two-ply yarn). Finally I plied the two-ply yarns together. You can see why this took so long, right?

Yes, it took a long time, but the texture of the resulting yarn is just incredible. This is the second cabled yarn I've spun, I think, though I've yet to knit any up. This skein is roughly sport weight and about 236 yards, so probably not enough for a pair of socks unless they're really short socks (which kind of defeat the purpose for me if they're wool), but I think it'd make some interesting fingerless mitts.

Now that this fiber is finally all used up, I'm craving some color that isn't green. I think this is going to go on the miniSpinner next:

Clearly this is calling out to be chain plied to preserve the gradient, so I'll start spinning from one end and just keep going until I get to the other end. This merino/silk will be such a treat after the corriedale!

Color Matching

Over the weekend, I came to a realization about my knitting. Though it was unintentional, it seems I have been color-coordinating all my projects. If you recall, the last two things off the needles (my Vitamin D and my Rubus suberectus Socks) were both gray. Now, it seems, everything must be green.

For starters, there's my Mad May sweater -- Alana Dakos's Gnarled Oak Cardigan -- which I'm knitting in tosh DK in Forestry, a deep, glowing green with a hint of blue.

I made very good progress on this over the weekend, as I was able to work on it in the car and in the hotel room both Friday and Saturday evening. I finished the body on Monday and started on the first sleeve, which is moving along a little slower than I was expecting (but I guess having two skeins of yarn attached and having to move them around regularly does slow one down).

Then, there are the socks, which are being knit out of my own handspun -- also in shades of green.

These saw some action over the weekend as well (I took them to the festival to work on while waiting in line or sitting and taking a break). I turned the heel on Saturday evening and now they are well on their way down the foot. I expect I'll have the first sock finished soon.

As if that wasn't enough green, there's my spinning.

If this looks familiar, it's because I'm spinning up the rest of the fiber that I used for the sock yarn. It's Corriedale pencil roving from Crown Mountain Farms in the colorway Eire. This batch is being spun into a 2x2 cabled yarn; this bobbin is number three of four, each holding about an ounce of fiber.

So it seems spring has arrived everywhere, even in my yarn and fiber choices. I wonder what next month's color theme will be!

Over and Done With

I finished the CMF mystery fiber. If you recall, it wasn't spinning very easily for me, so I decided to do a quick-and-dirty spin to finish it. I divided my fiber into thirds, more or less, and spun up some quick singles that were pretty uneven (mostly because I wasn't able to draft evenly with this fiber) and then plied them up in a very quick session yesterday afternoon. Here's the finished yarn:

Given how uneven the singles were, I'm actually pleasantly surprised that the finished yarn looks as nice as it does. Sure, there are still some uneven parts, but overall, it's a pretty round, bouncy three ply. It's also super bulky (at about 6 wraps per inch) and a whopping 94 yards. I don't think I'll be rushing to spin this fiber again, but I will say that by the third bobbin I was starting to get the hang of it. I also managed to do pretty well with my singles control while plying; when I'd finished plying everything, I had about a yard of singles leftover, so I definitely maximized what I had.

I'm quite excited about what is likely to be next on the wheel, which I'm sure will be quite a pleasure to spin. Take a look at this beauty that arrived in Friday's mail:

This is the March/April shipment for the Bee Mice Elf fiber club, a superwash BFL in a colorway called Hazy Days. I'm still undecided as to whether I'm going to spin this as a two ply or a three ply; for now, I'm just content to look at it and pet it!

True Blue

I love fast spins. My default yarn is not fast, so it's always a thrill to me when I can manage to spin something thick (relatively speaking) and it takes only a fraction of the time.

My most recent yarn took me about a week, though that's a bit of an overstatement because I didn't actually spin every day of that week. It was probably a total of four spinning sessions, so maybe 6 hours or so overall. I didn't overthink it, which was probably the key.

I started with 4 oz. of Falkland from Gwen Erin Natural Fibers that I'd picked up probably a year and a half ago; the colorway was called Blue Danube. Rainbow selected this from my fiber stash to become a hat for her (incidentally, the lost hat it was intended to replace has since turned up, so I might end up keeping this for myself or saving it for next winter).

I split this in half and then split one half in half again to do another fractal spin, though I don't think it's as obvious as the last time I did it because there is so little variation in the colors in the fiber.

I ended up with about 161 yards of springy, bouncy two ply that looks to be mostly Aran/bulky. That's a bit thicker than I was aiming for, but I love how the yarn turned out so much that I can't complain. Take a look at this sexy twist:

To give you an idea of how much spring is in this skein, I will tell you that my niddy noddy is two yards (72 inches) around, but after the skein dried, it measured only 52 inches around. Boing!

I was watching last week's Masterpiece Classic episode on my computer while I plied last night and finished the skein before the episode, so I pulled out something else to spin. I decided to start the Crown Mountain Farms mystery fiber that arrived a couple of weeks ago. My first clue about the state of this fiber should have been when I pulled about the bundle to divide it into thirds: Rather than being in one long length of top or roving, I had at least three pieces of differing lengths. It took a bit of time, but I got it divided more or less evenly. Then I sat down to spin the first bit -- and I must say that I was really disappointed. The fiber looked so beautiful in the bundle, but when I tried to spin it, it was a bit of a disaster. I tried to spin it using my usual worsted style, but it wouldn't draft evenly (I'd pull out clumps at a time). Then I tried a modified long draw, and it would work for a couple of minutes before it would fall apart.

I know it's a little hard to tell because of the color of the fiber, but the singles you see here are wildly inconsistent. I'm not happy with this fiber at all, but I'm going to do my best to finish spinning it -- as quickly as possible. I'm sure the finished yarn will be better than the singles, but I'm still a bit annoyed. This is not at all characteristic of the fiber I usually get from CMF, and I know that there was some concern about the quality of the fiber that kept it from being shipped out. When I'm done with this, I'm going to need to pull out some of the really good fiber I've been hoarding as a palate cleanser!

The Sock Yarn Experiment

Over in the Spin Doctor Ravelry group, several of us have started an informal spinalong to try out some new techniques for spinning sock yarn. I decided that this would be a great opportunity to use up some of the Crown Mountain Farms fiber in my stash, specifically some that I bought in a weak moment during one of their sales a few years ago. (Incidentally, they're having their spring sale right now. Yes, I am happy to enable.)

I used some of the Corriedale pencil roving, which comes in 8 oz. bundles. I didn't see the need to spin up that much, so I split the fiber in half, giving me 4 oz. to work with now and 4 oz. to do something else with later. I decided to spin up two skeins of yarn, one for each sock, so that I could compare the durability of the skeins/yarns, so I split that 4 oz. in half. Then I split each half into thirds; two-thirds of each half was spun onto one bobbin and the remaining third was spun onto another. All the singles, with the exception of one of the smaller bobbin's worth, were spun in the normal direction (Z). That one smaller bobbin's worth was spun S. Then I plied three singles at a time -- using both larger bobbins and one smaller one. When I used up all the singles on the smaller bobbin, I broke the other singles and started plying using the other small bobbin.

Still with me?

I plied the regular three ply first, then the opposing ply skein (the one with one ply going in the same direction as plying). The effect is that the opposing ply skein is much springier and twisty than a traditional three ply; this is supposed to add to the durability of the yarn.

Here are the two skeins freshly off the plying bobbin. Both are a little twisty because the plying twist is still active (this is before washing and finishing).

Traditional three ply on the top, opposing ply on the bottom

Here's a closeup for comparison:

Both skeins went into a hot bath, after which I vigorously snapped both of them by putting my arms in the middle of the skein and then stretching them out. After they'd dried, the change was significant, though you can still spot the difference in the skeins:

The opposing ply skein is still a little kinked up, but the skein hangs relatively straight. I ended up with approximately 190 yards of the traditional three ply and 153 yards of the opposing ply (there's more of the former because I started with that one and ran out of normal singles on the second skein).

Eventually I'm going to use the remaining 4 oz. of this fiber for a 2x2 cabled yarn (essentially two two-ply yarns plied together), but I need a little break from the fine green spinning and started yarn for a hat for Rainbow -- the Falkland she picked out about a week ago.

This'll be a two ply, probably sport to DK once it's plied -- it's amazing how fast fiber spins up when you're not doing superfine singles!

Better Late than Never

My spinning is still looking very much like it was last week -- I'm on bobbin #3 of 4 of my Corriedale singles:

I'm hoping to finish this one up tonight and get started on the final bobbin, which will be the one spun in the opposite direction (so it'll be extra twisty after plying).

The title of this post, however, doesn't refer to what's on the wheel so much as what might go on it next -- this fiber, which turned up Friday but which I didn't discover in the door until I left to go to yoga on Saturday morning.

This fiber is the last shipment of last year's Crown Mountain Farms fiber club, the surprise fiber, which should have arrived several months ago, but apparently there was a mill problem. In any case, it's here now, and it was kind of nice to get it so much later than I was expecting because in all honesty I forgot about it. So it's kind of like someone just sent me fiber out of the blue.

The mystery fiber ended up being Alpenschaf, if I'm reading Klaus's writing correctly; it's a fiber I've never even heard of, let alone spun. It feels very much like a Corriedale to me -- most definitely a medium wool, not too coarse but not super soft either. I haven't pulled it apart at all to see what the staple length is yet, but I'm in love with the colors. It's almost as if Klaus dyed this just for me, because (as I'm sure you know if you've been reading this blog long enough) I love blues. The camera and the light made this look like it has a little more contrast than it actually does; what looks like black in the photo is really more of a navy in real life. I'm excited to spin this up and mix all these blues together! But first things first -- and with that, I'm off to my wheel.

All Over the Place

I am, primarily, a worsted-style spinner. It's not the most efficient/fastest way of spinning, and the yarn I get is certainly dense, but it's how I like to spin, for the most part. Occasionally I'll push myself outside my comfort zone and spun woolen, like when I happen to get roving rather than top. That was the case with the October fiber club shipment from Crown Mountain Farms.

This shipment was 4 oz. of Clun Forest roving. This was a new-to-me fiber, and it looked to be relatively short stapled, so I decided that, given the prep, it would be a good choice to use it to practice my long draw technique. I split the fiber into halves and spun up each half in a relatively short spinning section (only about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes each). I think this may have been the first time it ever took me longer to ply a yarn than it took me to spin the singles.

The finished yarn is about 205 yards.

The title of this post refers to the consistency (or lack thereof) of this yarn -- it's really all over the place, ranging from fingering in some spots to super bulky in others. Still, this may be the fluffiest, squishiest skein I've ever spun. I so wish you could reach into the screen to give this hank a good squeeze! I have absolutely no idea what to do with this yarn (I'm a broken record, I know), but for now I'll be satisfied to hug it.

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!