Frustrations and Fun

I just spent the past week and a half spinning.  I carded, combed and spun with a mission.  I took my time so that everything was as perfect as it could be and then too my time spinning so that I had lovely, consistent yarns that I was happy with.

I started with some indigo dyed mohair locks.  There weren't enough, or so I thought, so I blended them with an equal amount of white mohair to make a yarn which would be a core yarn.  The instructions said it had to be tightly spun, so I did just that, spinning a smooth, higher twist yarn.

 Then I carded up some commercially dyed wool roving, again with an equal percentage.  I roughly blended the two colours and got this interesting green/blue blend which spun up beautifully.   I tried for something with less twist and fatter than the lovely  mohair singles.  The finished singles weren't quite as vibrant as I'd hoped but they were pretty enough for the job I'd planned for them.

I spent days spinning a lovely lemon yellow fine silk single to go with the above two.  I then tried my hand at 3 ply spiral plying and I can tell you that my results suck most spectacularly!  Not even worthy of a photo.    After 3 days of practice plying, just the spiral wrapping, not even the final ply, I know that sometime in the future I will be doing this whole darned thing over again, putting way less twist in the core yarn that the instructions say is necessary, because the Z twist core, wrapping with a Z twist wrap just wasn't gelling for me this week.  I was frustrated to the max and had used unpleasant words more than a few times, I'm sorry to say, while I drank way too much herbal tea and listened to way too many miserably sad country songs trying to find one which talked about loosing it while spinning.  Turns out they're all about losing women, dogs and trucks, not a single thing about a spinning wheel!

Last night, I headed off to the guild's Spinning Night.  It was a miserable drive in because this time of year, traveling west, puts the setting sun, exactly at my eye level and I'm too short for the sun visor on the truck to work for me in any useful way, unless that sun is just before or past high noon
.  However, when I picked up the room key, a cheerful Pat, our guild president, informed me it was her birthday and we had a nice, albeit short chat which put me in a much better frame of mind.  By the time spinning night was done, I was relaxed and having again.

Linda had brought a bunch of Mohair for us to play with. Mohair is the hair from Angora goats.  We had a lovely, green mohair 20% /Shetland 80% blend which spun like butter, mohair batts and mohair locks.  It was informal, informative and really good company.

This is the Mohair/Shetland blend.  I spun it as thin as I could, though it's really not a useful sort of yarn weight.  It would work for a strengthening thread for sock yarn perhaps, or a very fine lace weight.  However, it was fun to spin and fun to see if I could keep it that fine without breaking (yep, I did!) and fun to see just how much yarn I could get with the bit of roving we had to play with.  Linda was pretty generous though, so it wasn't difficult!   I'm now ready to start to battle the Level 4 Master Spinner homework again.  Phew..