Sunday, November 25, 2012

Still exhausted and fighting off the cold...but at least I don't feel queasy.

Skipped out on Thanksgiving; planted garlic (Killarney Red) instead. Fiber (fibrous?) activities: spun up all the wool/silk blend roving. It's pink, brown and white blended together. If that sounds yucky, it's approximately the same color as a chocolate with strawberry creme filling. I spun it fine, slightly thicker than laceweight, 2 ply for strength. Then I took out a 4 oz braid of Merino roving that I bought some time ago. It is a blend of purple-blue-teal-brown-algae green. I could have spun it up as it was, but not being one to let thing alone, I broke it up and sorted it by color, and then sequenced the spinning so that instead of being all those colors mixed up, it starts out teal, goes to brown, then to algae green, to blue and finally purple. That was the idea anyway. Merino is very fine and very soft...but I don't recommend spinning it right after working with silk or any silk blend. Silk is fine but strong. You can spin it quite fine and it will still be a good yarn. Merino also is very fine...but it snaps and breaks so easily that I could scream. After spinning it all up, I somehow managed to lose an end of the yarn while unwinding it from the bobbin last night at dusk, when the light was beginning to dim. Gave up in disgust, tried again this morning. It's a tangly mess and has numerous knots, where I had to break it in order to get it out of a tangle and off the bobbin...or where it simply snapped while being handled. Ugh! The plan was to full this yarn (fulling is a process similar to felting- you shrink and tighten the wool garment, yarn, etc, making it less likely to shrink in the future and adding strength. Fulling it might help to conceal some of those knots.... But it's equally tempting to ply it with a bobbin of very finely spun but much stronger sky blue yarn, from a roving that appears to have some luster longwool, that I dyed using black beans. I don't have anymore of this exact color blue, but the other batch of black-bean dyed wool, using the same roving, is a slightly different shade of light purple. It is surprising how two different brands or sources of black beans can result in different colors. If I wait until the purple sequence...wait: no. To do this, I'd have to wind the wretched stuff back onto a bobbin. No fucking way. It's getting fulled.

And after that? Light brown Romney? Suri Alpaca? Ooh yeah...the Suri alpaca is probably going to win out here!

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