Friday Night Results!

Yesterday, I cut out a shirt for my sweetie and realized that where I have my sewing machine set up would be just too cold and too dark to sew.  It's in the laundry/mud room and there isn't proper lighting in there for night time work, although many windows make it a wonderful place to sew during the day.  It was pretty cold last night and while wood heat is lovely, the farther away from the stove you are, the cooler the house is.   Other than the bedrooms, which are pretty much unheated, the sewing machine is set up in the farthest spot away from the stove. Next time I'll plan ahead and set up a table in the living room.

Instead, I worked at the drum carder.  All the indigo dyed superwash Merino was dry and I didn't want to pack it into a little bag and forget about it.  I carded up 6 lovely batts.  It only took 2 passes through the carder to get them nice and smooth.  I didn't worry too much about completely blending the fibres as I wanted a little bit of variation in the yarn.  It won't be a lot, as the colours were quite even right from the beginning.

I finished up the South African top and plied it.  I ended up with about 600 yards of plied yarn.  It's lovely and soft, even spun with a short draw for a worsted type yarn.     I noticed when I tried to find an empty bobbin to ply the yarn onto, that many of my bobbins had ends of singles from previous projects.  So I took the last of the white singles I'd just plied and plied them with some of the dark Dyer's Knotweed blue.  Then I used the rest of that dark blue and plied it with some leftover grey to make two small sample skeins.  It was rather fun spinning the two little skeins for barber pole results.

Finally, I opened up a bag of the Blue Leicester roving which my son gave me.  This breed is one of my very favourites to spin.  It is long and soft and very, very yummy.    It's white.  It looks like much of the other white yarns I've spun.  I was able to spin over half a bobbin last night.  Considering it's a fairly fine yarn, I'm pretty happy with that!  No photo of this because really, it looks so much like the bobbin of South African singles, that you can look here to see it.  However if you could feel the two different yarns, you'd find the South African was soft but the Blue Faced Leicester was ooh, so much softer!  The fact that it is roving which will make a more lofty yarn to begin with helps a bit with that.  That the roving is light, fluffy and practically spins itself, is a bonus!