Miscellaneous spinning
...And the equivalent quick update from the spinning front!
The top picture is the second batch of Wisteria fibre that's destined for navajo plying. It's about 300m, which means I'm still on track to product at least 200m of possibly-sock-weight three-ply. I'm itching to ply it, but navajo works better if the singles have relaxed a bit, so I am resisting the urge.
The second picture is my skein of spinning oddballs :-) I have a long-term wip which I've mentioned before, of a scrap scarf made from all the remnants of my commercial yarn; I decided early on in my spinning that I didn't want to absorb my handspun remnants into that scrap project, but would make a separate one. The new Knitty has some stash-busting remnant ideas, which reminded me to get on with sorting out my spinning remnants, so I skeined it up yesterday, and was surprised that it comes to about 100m! And it's really pretty. It's currently one of the 'pet' skeins sitting on my desk to be stroked every now and again, and it's made me realise properly that I love all of my spinning, even my crappy beginner efforts. I don't feel quite the same about my knitting - I feel attached to all of it, but I don't feel uniformly positive about all of it, possibly because it's now finished, and has to be judged on how well it is performing its function. My handspun yarn, on the other hand, is still en route to its finished state (since I assume I'll eventually get round to knitting with most of it), so there are no disappointments to detract from my love for it. I can see flaws in some, of course, but I love every little bit of it anyway.
The second and third pics are singles from Texere's cerise merino, about 224m/50g, which I spun on one of the new whorls offered by my new flyer (bottom picture). The second picture is just before I twisted the skein into, well, a skein, and I just loved how it all curled up like that :-)
The fourth pic is of the same skein, sitting on top of the silk hankies which I will probably ply some of it with. The hankies probably won't make as much yardage as the wool (I got about 150m from the other pack of hankies), so I'll have to think a bit more about it. Maybe I'll keep it as singles, and just knit it in a project with the silk, or maybe I'll ply them (like the lilac 'silk cut' yarn), and put the leftover singles into the next skein of oddball. Not sure yet.
Finally, as mentioned above, my new flyer. I'm pretty certain now that my wheel is an Ashford Traditional (from the 1970s - about the same age as me!), and since my existing flyer had only one whorl (ie only one speed at which the flyer moves relative to the wheel), I splashed out on a replacement flyer with three - three! - whorls (whorls are the circles-with-groves at the left of the picture - the drive band (piece of string) is wrapped around the middle one in the pic). What this means is that I can spin with more twist (for finer yarn), without having to vary the treadling speed. This is a good thing, because there's a speed of treadling that is most comfortable, and controlling twist by speeding up is annoying and tiring. And since this (relatively cheap) addition works, that means I can plan for later, more expensive, additions, like a lace flyer unit which provides more - and smaller - whorls, ie higher ratios and allow for even finer yarn.
