Spinning, carding and the dreaded laundry drama

It's autumn.  The weather has cooled off and it's been rainy.   The washer went on the fritz in the middle of a load of clothes, on a wet, miserable day and I had to wring out each piece of clothing by hand.  Of course I do cold water washes (brrrr) and I was washing heavy, linen camp clothes, so it was a more than miserable job.  I spent two days finding it's replacement, convincing the salesperson that if I couldn't take it home with me, I'd go elsewhere ( no, I did not want to wait a week to get the washer) and getting it home.  The evening of day three was allotted for hooking it up since it was raining anyway and not suitable for hanging clothes outside.  I'm finally caught up with the laundry..  yay..

 20m skeins of plied embroidery wools

In between laundry dramas, I was spinning.   I started off spinning East Friesian Milk Sheep fleece and ended up with some generic fibre blend sliver.   I'm supposedly making embroidery wools and the East Friesian just wasn't spinning up fine enough, although the bit of luster was really nice.   It's not bad, just not quite what I wanted.  The generic sliver was finer and as a result, I have a couple of skeins of really nice yarn.   Most of this will be naturally dyed sometime this week.

We were out and about on Saturday, mainly to Ealdormere's Coronation, an SCA event which was held in St. Catherine's.   It was a  lovely event but to get there, we have to drive by a small town called Jordan which is the location of The Fibre Garden, an awesome spinner's supply store.  As we drove by, I chose not to stop in on our way there as we were running late as it was.   However after the main festivities, my sweet husband whispered in my ear, that if I didn't mind leaving early, we'd stop in on our way home.  How could I pass up that offer?    They had mill ends on sale, which card up beautifully and Sari Silk - which I've been wanting to play with and Icicle top -which is a sparkly nylon you can add to fibre to give it a bit of sparkle/shine!   This is what came out of my drum carder..  please note, it's black, not grey but I was only going to fuss with the light for so long.    I've used about 10-15% Sari Silk and 1% Icicle sliver.  It's spinning up so nicely.   And I have to give kudos to the boys at The Fibre Garden, who make shopping there so much fun, are so accommodating and don't think anything of it, when you show up in weird medieval costumes because you left without changing in your hurry to get there before they closed.... and selection... phew, they have so much fibre there, it's amazing.