The fiber from the last post (autumn squash, falkland) has been turned into a lovely pair of socks. The first picture shows the colors better, while the second picture shows the textures better.

I haven’t worn them, yet. But I’m solidly convinced that I will spin more falkland in the future.

I spun this in my office, while I was waiting on phone calls or for processes to complete, or whatever. I took it home and just barely plied it together. It’s superwash Merino, and yielded about 465 yards out of four ounces.

It will be some lovely heathered socks.  Or something.

Aurora and I tried our hand at dying some fiber.  We did cake dyes set in a crock pot with citric acid.  Here’s what it looked like dying:

Here it is drying in my office:

Here it is as a skein of yarn:

And, finally, here it is on Aurora’s hands:

That’s what she had in mind when we started, although I think she had hoped for the yellow to show more rather than morphing into a green.

I joined a fiber club, from the inestimable BrewerGnome, aka Dan. His first offering was called “Anubis”, and was dyed the black, turquoise and orange associated with Anubis. It was a new fiber for me, Wensleydale, which has a surprisingly long staple length, especially when you’ve been spinning Merino. Dan also suggested that we might try fractal spinning, so that’s what I did with it. Here’s the resulting yarn:

And here it is, almost finished as a hat. Aurora thinks it need ear flaps before it’s done.

Another project, Woodsman. Superwash BFL. I’ve already posted about the fiber, so here’s a picture of the finished object, a pair of socks which I gave away just a couple of days ago. I should have tried them on, first, because I think they’d feel wonderfully warm.

I spun some Dorset fiber, which is apparently very tough to felt. This would make it ideal for socks, of course. I should get around to that…

That should be it, for now. I do know that I’ve got more to take pictures of, but that will wait for another day.

One side note: it’s snowing today, and I’m very glad for the wool I have on my feet, on my hands and on my head.

The gloves were her request. She picked the fiber off etsy.  It looked like this:

I’m a little surprised at how different the two ends of the yarn ended up being.  When I look at this picture of the fiber, though, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.

In any case, the gloves ended up being more fraternal than identical.  That’s cool by Aurora, and I kinda like it, too.

The hat also has some handspun in it–the brown stripes.

Now I just need to finish Elenna’s socks and cast on Cambria’s mittens.

2-ply sock yarn, 375 yards, 3.75 ounces.  Superwash BFL.  I wish I had a faster flyer because I felt like it took forever to ply it, and it’s still underplied in spots.  I also have upgraded my feelings about superwash from ‘hate’ to ‘dislike’.  Perhaps I’ll give it a spin again in the future.

The Abby Batt  (“Denny”) after plying and finishing.  I did this as a 2×2 cabled yarn, so that’s four plies.  Cabled yarns are supposed to make your stitch definition pop, so I need to find something that can be done with 90 yards of yarn that will show off the FREAKING PRETTY YARN.

I’ve never done gloves before, so I’m doing a really basic pattern, and I’m relying on the colors of the handspun to make them interesting.  I’m happy so far.

What’s on my wheel now?  Oatmeal BFL, of course.

And since today seemed that it might be the last possible time I could take a pictures of the leaves in my yard (after having missed some incredible shots… I has a sad), here are a couple of reasons I love my flowering pears so much.

I had read that superwash was “slippery”, and now I know what that means. On the other hand, it did seem a bit easier to draft because of that slipperiness.

Now, a tiny bit of backstory. When I opened the mail package which contained this fiber, my youngest daughter said that she loved it, and would I please make a scarf out of it for her? Okay, so I knew from the get-go exactly what I would be making with this fiber. Secondly, I had read that once a spinner learns how to spin tiny fiber, it’s hard to go back to spinning fatter fiber. I set out to prove to myself that I could spin fat. This is a three-ply chunky-weight yarn, so I feel satisfied that I can do what I wanted to do.

The fiber was named “Pacific Surf” by the seller, and it does call to mind both the foam and deep blue of the sea, as well as the greys of rocky shorelines. So I chose a wavy pattern for the scarf and named the result “Stone and Sea”.

Kind of nice to start the spinning with the end result in mind, and then have it turn out pretty close to what I had originally envisioned. I should get a better photo, one that shows the wavy pattern on the scarf a little better. You can best see it in this picture on the right-hand side.

In other news, I did finish the mittens mentioned in this post. And here they are, with a fairly large amount of leftover yarn. I am a bit amused by that.

And, I finished the yarn I mentioned in this post, but it has turned out to be more of a sport-weight than a fingering-weight yarn. I seem to be unable to spin fingering-weight since the one time I succeeded in it. I’ll get that yet! Anyway, here’s the yarn. It’s a 2-ply yarn, about 270 yards, 4 ounces. I am inordinately pleased at the colors.

Also, here’s a slight peek at my current spinning project. I’m not ready to show more than this yet, though.

I started with this:

This project went through quite a bit. I started off spinning it on my malachite spindle, which was just peachy:

Until I broke the whorl (as recounted earlier):

I finished it up, happily, when the seller of the spindle replaced the whorl for me (also recounted earlier):

I set out to make this a three-ply yarn, and I’d even split up the fiber as evenly as I could before spinning it up. I put each of the three singles onto their own bobbin and then wound from the bobbins into a plying ball. Of course, none of the singles were the same length as the others, leading to this picture:

I did figure out a way to waste only a couple feet of singles. Because I know you worried about it.

In any case, this was the final skein, shiny bamboo in it and all:

Now here comes the most exasperating part of this whole thing. I had targeted a 3-ply yarn, which I now had. Unfortunately, it wasn’t fingering-weight at all. It was more of a DK weight, or maybe a sport weight. So socks were out.

I tried making socks out of them anyway. Knit almost a whole sock, twice, but even with an ankle cuff instead of a leg on the sock, it was clear that I didn’t quite have enough to knit a pair of socks. So I finally settled on a pair of mittens. Of course, I’m not actually done with them yet, but I did want to get a picture showing how beautifully the colors knit up. In fact, it’s the whole reason for this post. So here we go:

I’m pretty confident that I’ll have enough for the second mitten, but it’s such an inexact science figuring that out… Cross your fingers for me.

But now looks like this:

I’m thinking this would make some nice mittens for a little girl who loves purple. Like Cambria.

To be honest, this sat in a plying ball for weeks because I really haven’t caught the love of plying. I have another plying ball that I have sort of ignored for a while now, but I should really get it finished up. It is yarn for socks, after all, and I do love my socks.

Then I turned it into this:

And, after washing and drying and a bit of knitting, got a hat.

The natural light shows off the color variations better, but the flash photo looks closer to real life (at least to my eye.)

I didn’t really know what to expect from the fiber in the first place, but I like the way the colors have become subtle under spinning and plying.

I didn’t even drop it from very high…  and I was almost done with the singles for that three-ply yarn I’ve been working on.  Ah, well, I guess that means it’s time for me to jump into the wishlist.  I have now ordered a Bossie (canarywood mini), so we’ll get to see if they’re really little tornadoes.  I just wish I already had it in my itchy fingers.

I haven’t been spinning very much lately, because I’ve sort of been focused on getting some socks done, so it’s kind of ironic that I decided to put a couple of hours into finishing up these singles tonight while I was at the yarn store, hanging out with all of the knitters there.  I was just about to get up and leave when I dropped the spindle.  Argh.

Ah, well.  There are worse things which have happened to me for sure.  And this sort of forced me (please don’t throw me into the briar patch!) into ordering that Bossie, so I guess this is a good thing from a certain point of view.

It’s just… well, this was my first pretty spindle.  I have some sentimental value attached to it just for that, and while I’m fairly sure I could glue it back together, it just won’t be the same.  I think I may glue it back together just so I can have it to look at, but I am fairly sure that its spinning days are over.

I don’t know what I expected from this, but I didn’t understand how separate and vibrant these colors would turn out in the singles.

First this:

And then this:

I ended up turning it into a hat for Cambria, since all those pinks made it unsuitable for me to wear.  I’m funny like that.  And this reminds me that I need to get a photo of the hat, since I don’t have one right now.

My color sense is improving, though.  In this yarn, I knew from the beginning that there would be a faux-fair-isle look to part of it, but I had no idea that the banding in the different colors would be so even.

Yes, that’s the infamous k2p2-ribbed sock recipe.  It’s a secret, I tell you, so don’t go spreading it around!

And sometimes I know almost exactly how the color is going to work out.  The fiber that I started spinning over the holidays (as noted in this post) is working out almost exactly as I had planned.

Here’s a shot showing off my lovely malachite spindle (my dreamspindle):

Here’s one showing how the singles are spinning up.  Notice the lovely luster the merino/bamboo blend has.

And here is the ubiquitous penny shot (to give a sense of scale):

I’m feeling much more confident in my ability to spin this stuff up.  I might even venture into the carroty silk one day…

But it is nice that I’m starting to have a sense of what the fiber will look like as I work with it.  Now we’ll see if the plied yarn and finished objects look anything like the vision I have in my head.