first some housekeeping and helpful google fu for anyone who is looking: If suddenly, the Bad Behavior 2 plugin for wordpress starts making your comments hang up and publishing posts gives a 404 error, maybe check to see if there are any updates for your template. For some reason, K2 and BB2 decided they didn’t get along any more, so they broke up. I tried Spam Karma 2, but K2 wasn’t ready to love again, and there were still problems with comments. Updating to the latest nightly build of K2 (always a bit of a pain, sorry if things got a little wonky here yesterday) seemed to mend all wounds with BB2. I think. If anyone has problems commenting, let me know! aw crap. it started again. something is buggy, and I give up.
alright. Those that don’t knit, spin, or have an appreciation for either of those arts can probably stop reading now.
BIRTHDAY GIFT MONEY YARN ORGY!
debbie blis rialto aran, and two skeins of undyed trekking
malabrigo laceweight, and tilly tomas disco lights (that is slowly becoming Cake)
Yesterday at Knitch we had a spinning day, which I think we’re going to make a monthly occurrence - every 2nd Sunday of the month, I think. I was still working on spinning the green portion of the green and pink merino silk roving I bought at Knitch last month.
Photos blatantly stolen from Claudia:
me, Sandy (steelers! err….ugh. let’s not speak of them right now) Jen, and Jane. And me spinning some green!
I started plying pink and green, and finished it allll up last night. I even calculated yardage! Which was tricky, because my niddy noddy is just plain weird! See to the left there? The wound hank is 30 inches long. which means the length around is 60 inches. Which means 1 2/3 yards around. which means more math involved in calculating yardage.
Pain in the ASS, right? Meh. Not really. (wraps around NN x 60)/36 = yardage
It’s pretty obvious that there was a learning curve to this yarn. The pink, that I spun up first is thicker and more uneven. The silk in it is very grabby and wants to slub off. Also, if you don’t relax your death grip on the roving you’re drafting as you spin, you tend to hold back the silk bits until it all comes out in a big silk barf ball. Which Jen is actually a “feature” of the yarn. Hooray! By the time I got to spinning the green roving, I had gotten a lot better at controlling this and was able to spin it more evently. What this all means is that I got a LOT more green yarn than I did pink.
But look how it plied together!
eeee! fun!
and even though I think I’m still overspinning the yarn, I seem to make up for when plying:
very little twisting - means even ply, right?
So now I have almost 300 yards pretty pretty yarn, and 68 yards of unplied green singles.
Now I just have to decide what I want to make with it!
Pretty! Your pink & green yarn looks absolutely delicious.
The twisting of the skein really doesn’t mean anything unless the singles are VERY fresh. I sure wish that meme hadn’t found such a foothold with new spinners. It’s just a very rough guide as to whether the yarn is balanced or not.
A better way to tell if it’s balanced: look at the way the fibers lie within the strands of yarn (NOT in the way the two plies wrap around each other.) If they’re like this |||||| your yarn is balanced. If they’re like this ////// or like this \\\\\ it’s not perfectly balanced. But even a not-perfectly-balanced yarn can be a fine yarn. It’s really just not that critical.
Very pretty, but I’m doing good to tie my shoes. Knitting is way out of my league.
It’s got to be cool to knit what you spin yourself–any idea what it’s going to be when it grows up?
Balanced yarn? Honey, if you soak it long enough and wack the shit out of it on the counter top before hanging to dry, it’ll balance. At least in my experience. =P I think it looks great!
grace - please stop drooling on my yarn, you’ll felt it!
Janice - ooooohhhhh. Well, blame Jen
The fibers look pretty straight to me, so maybe I still did OK!
Brighton - knitting is really not that much harder than tying your shoelaces, I swear! Every fancy knitting you’ve ever seen is really just comprised of two very simple stitches. using chopsticks is harder.
PW - not sure yet. maybe something like this.
TG76 - hmmm…that would mean I’d have to clean off my countertops
LOVE the yarn!! But I want some pics of you whacking it around on the countertops!! Haha!! Why isn’t Sadie WEARING it for your pics?!?!?!