Babble

With the Other House being worked on by contractors, we're taking a little break from all the sorting and cleaning, which is finally giving me some time for Fiber Therapy. I don't have any pictures to show you, because if I stopped to take pictures of stuff, I wouldn't be spinning.

I freaking LOVE my new wheel.

One thing it affords me is more efficiency. I'm a much faster drafter now than when I first started, and I'm discovering that, with the Rose, I don't have to slow down to match the pace of my wheel. Over the weekend I finished spinning and then plied 3 monster skeins of chocolate brown alpaca AND spun a full (giant, Majacraft-sized) bobbin-and-half of merino-silk for my next sweater. Days of work now takes hours.

OH YEAH, I've started spinning for the next sweater. I decided Malicious Salad would best be used for other projects, which left me still without a green sweater. The Diminishing Rib Cardigan by Andrea Pomerantz, featured on the cover of this spring's Interweave Knits, seemed like a good project for Spring knitting:
I'm doing something new and courageous with this project: I am attempting, with my spinning, to replicate the gauge of the yarn used by the designer. I ended up falling for this pattern because it happens that the yarn used (Savoy, by Stacy Charles) is a wool-silk blend, and I, coincidentally, had 2 lbs of wool-silk blend fiber waiting for my next project. I have dyed it green, but not solidly - I want the yarn to have a bit of a tweedy look when I'm done. (I also am spinning this yarn with a bit of "character" - not going for the ultimately smooth, milled look of the Savoy stuff - and I think this sweater design will really suit that look.)

The internet tells me that this yarn is an "Aran weight" and measures about 8 wraps-per-inch - that is, if I wrap this yarn around a ruler without pulling or squishing it too tightly, it's going to loop around the ruler approximately 8 times per inch. I started spinning the singles and then just 3-plied it back on itself, measured it, then adjusted the thickness of my singles until it worked out to 8 wpi. (Okay, fine, I didn't adjust and remeasure; I just eyeballed it and announced, "That looks about right!" and knocked on wood.) There is a wee bit of variation in my my singles, but that's alright; I'm just going for an approximation, not an exact science.

Maybe tonight I'll take pictures and then tomorrow I will go on and on about how much I like spinning this particular fiber. I could definitely see myself making more than one sweater with this stuff.