Six Hands: The yarn is finished and heading to the next artisan

I finished spinning and plying late on Saturday, washed the yarn on Sunday and let it dry while watching the Steelers football game. I will not comment on the game except to say that I'm happy we won and that perhaps the NFL should insist on more extensive training for the officiating department--which is MUCH nicer language than I used during the actual game!

The yarn is firm due to the nice tight spin and ply, yet soft and supple due to the Merino/alpaca fibers. Just the right yarn for a long-wearing yet soft garment. The yarn is being forwarded to Dottie at http://www.ccdzs.blogspot.com/ Let's see what her creative mind and talented hands can do with this yarn.

Six hands: It may LOOK easy to make yarn, but….

…getting it right is sometimes it’s a royal PITA. Here's the first bobbin of luscious alpaca spun up on my Reeves double-treadle chair wheel.










I’d planned to use some of my own combed top with the Whirligig Yarns dyed alpaca, and I chose the wrong colors for it! Well, not the ‘wrong’ colors as there really ARE no wrong colors, but the wrong colors for the end product I was trying to achieve. Here’s the waaay too bright yarn—









And here’s the waaay too bright yarn being stripped off the spinning wheel bobbin so it can be un-plied and respun onto the bobbin. It's a good thing that the cats had gone outside to climb the apple tree--they think I do these things just for their amusement.









And then I had to spin another color that would be closer to what I wanted and ply the alpaca with it. It took me the better part of an entire day to unply, respin, spin and re-ply the yarn. The first successful skein is finished, so it’s onward to spinning the second skein the next few days, washing both of them to remove spinning and hand oils and give the alpaca a little ‘bloom’, and then they go onward to the next craftsperson. Check back to see what happens….

Six hands make a project

I’m a member of the Fiber Arts Street Team on Etsy.com—we call ourselves Etsy FAST for short, and it’s also the tag we use for the Etsy search engine so we can find each others’ work. We encourage, advise, and support each other in our creative paths and the team includes artists in most fiber mediums. Spinning, knitting, crochet, weaving, felting and embroidery are techniques that pop to mind although I’m sure I’ve left out a bunch of others (blame it on low caffeine levels today). We have monthly ‘challenges’ where we choose a topic meant to inspire us to create something that defines or describes that topic. We’ve done the Olympics, heroes, harvest, candy and others. Decembers challenge is teamwork, meaning we’ll do a piece using materials from another team member. Since I’m primarily a spinner I wanted to take it a step beyond simply spinning fiber from another member and suggested that some members could form a trio (or more) and work on a project. And I thought it would be fun to watch my trio progress toward the final goal, so I’m putting up pix of the fiber I’m working with. I stumbled onto this combed top at Whirlygig Yarns while wandering around the team sites and I managed to resist it for about….oh, 2 days maybe? It arrived home on Thursday and I couldn’t wait to get my hands into it. It’s 3.7 oz. of huacaya alpaca dyed in a soft rainbow of colors.

















I’ve just started spinning it, and it’s just lovely to work with. The colors when spun up are clear and change frequently and the color changes are subtle which is just perfect for the end use. I’ll be combining this with some of my own fiber and will hopefully get about 600-700 yards of sportweight yarn. I’ll be posting photos of the yarn being spun and the final plied and washed yarn. And at some point we should be seeing the finished product. I already know where the yarn is going and she’s a wonderful artist, but you’ll have to wait to see what she does with my yarn!

And on another topic completely, Pitt tromped all over Louisville yesterday, Penn State was beaten by Iowa (snort, chuckle), and the Steelers are set to beat the Colts today at 4:15 EST. Life is good…..

I finally made it

Finally found my way into blogdom after retiring from my job, getting my life re-organized around having the time to do WHAT I WANT (shouting cause it feels good to do WHAT I WANT and not what's required of me), and hunting down a host I liked. And having the courage to actually post. No photo of me yet, as the Kodak decided to freeze up on me. Paid $20 for a new battery, charged it, and the camera still doesn't work. Will cost $125 + $48 shipping just to have them look at it. Decided to use hubby's Nikon, only to have the battery go dead on it. Now that $40 battery is charging so that hopefully I can finish my photos tomorrow. I simply must update my Etsy page with all the new spinning fiber I made last week and it's making me nuts to wait for a little bit of metal in a battery wrapper to charge up.