Bobbins Emptied! Yay!

 Ta Da!  I've emptied 9 bobbins of bits and pieces of the tail end of whatever I'd been spinning and either ran out or got distracted.   The 10th bobbin is holding reeled silk from level 6, Master Spinner at Olds College.  I need to wind that off onto holding bobbins. The bobbin isn't needed immediately,so the silk is safe where it is for the moment.  It was interesting digging up all the bobbins and figuring out what was on each one.   It turns out I'd stashed the bobbins together, so the hunt for them wasn't all that difficult, once I'd figured out where I'd put them.

There was a bit of natural green cotton left on one bobbin.  It was still wet and wouldn't cooperate with being turned into a skein.  I'm pretty sure the larger white skein is Merino.  I'm not sure about the small one, because it's a little bit whiter, but it feels just as soft.   The Merino/Cashmere/Silk is easy to identify because I'd dumped a bunch of it into the exhausted vat of Japanese Indigo, just to use up the last of the dye.   I've a large zip-lock full of it. 
The Ramie isn't an end of bobbin but was a 50 gram bag that I'd spun up.  The colour is oddly called sunrise, and I'm presuming it is the sky colour at sunrise.  However if I had ordered this site unseen on colour alone, I'd have been quite surprised.  This bit of ramie shows that all commercially processed sliver and roving isn't the same.  The dark blue that I'd spun before (aptly named midnight) was long fibres, smooth and easy to spin.  This stuff was chock full of short bits and neps.  The short bits were less than 2 inches long, often only an inch and a lot of the neps just got spun in as they were well blended into the fibre.   Even when picked out by hand, they wouldn't budge.  It took a lot more concentration to spin this pale blue ramie.  If I'd gotten this bag of Ramie the first time I'd ever spun it, I'd be turned off the fibre.  However Ramie is generally lovely to spin and a nice bast fibre.

I've often mused over why the packaging of so much fibre in 50 g amounts.  It's great for sampling, for sure, but I find it not so great for actually using in a project.  I'm going to have to just keep getting 50 g of Ramie and spinning it up until I have enough to use for a real project, instead of just decorating a bin or basket.