A little spinning

Okay, quite a lot of spinning! I seem to be in a bit of a spinny mood at the moment – the fact that I was knitting something I wasn’t enjoying but wanted to have done, so I didn’t dare start knitting anything else could have something to do with this…

This is everything I’ve spun since Christmas – now I just need to knit with it!

Here’s some more photos and a few details – I’ve linked each one to my Ravelry stash pages with more info if you’re interested.

First up were the rainbow braids from Hilltop Cloud – there were four, but I’d started spinning before I realised I hadn’t taken a photo. I know I posted about these before, but I don’t think I did after they were finished.

 

They made two rainbow skeins, which graduate from red through to purple. I’m thinking of using them for fairisle, with an off white yarn for the background colour.

Next up was some gorgeous merino and bamboo fibre from Artist’s Palette, one of my very favourite dyers. I thought it was one strip of variegated top, but it turned out to be one of purple, and one of pink/purple. I thought about plying them together, but in the end I decided to make two separate skeins. It’s a lovely glossy fingering-ish weight.

The colour’s not bad on this one, but I’ve taken photos of that purple in all sorts of places and lights before it came out even vaguely right!

Mollie thinks that skeins of yarn make lovely pillows, thankyouverymuch.

This is alpaca/silk from FeltStudioUK, another favourite of mine. Again my first plan was to ply them together, but they weren’t quite even in weight, and whilst I toyed with the idea of trying to make one thinner than the other to compensate, I decided that that would require far too much concentration, and went for separate skeins again.

I don’t really like spinning hairy fibres like alpaca (or mohair or Wensleydale), I find I tend to put too much twist in them and they come out ropy. I did manage to keep this one a bit softer, but I think it’s a bit underplied, and it’s a bit hairy too. I’m sure it’ll look better once it’s knitted up! I’m thinking of doing a Daybreak shawl with these two.

I grabbed this braid of Spindlefrog (I still miss her lovely fibres!) merino/soy/bamboo on my way out to spinning group last week. My plan was to spin it fairly thick, and I even put a big whorl on my wheel, but it didn’t seem to want to go thick, and I ended up having to put lots of plying twist in it to keep it together.

It looked madly overplied when I took it off the niddy noddy.

But a good soak and whack sorted it out, and now it’s a nicely balanced light-dk weight. It’s okay now it’s spun, but I wasn’t mad of spinning it – I’m not sure whether it was the soy or the bamboo, but something made it a bit sticky to draft.

Last but definitely not least, two similar braids of superwash BFL, again from Artist’s Palette. This time I did go with my original plan of plying them together!

The patches of colour were quite short, shorter than the staple length in places, so they’ve blended together well.

And it’s a nice bouncy aran weight – there’s about 350m/185g.