Spinning Goodness

I've been reluctant to leave my spinning wheel this week. A word of warning to the uninitiated, spinning is very addictive.

Addictive or not, I'm still a long way off making the yarn of my dreams. But, here's my latest skein: 129m of sport-ish weight multi-coloured goodness. I showed it to you on my bobbin last week and since then I've spun another single and plied them together.

It's tricky to get to grips with how tightly to spin the singles and how tightly, or loosely, to ply them together. Lots of this skein is over spun and plied too tightly. Despite soaking it, thwacking it (great word huh?! I'm interpreting it to mean wacking the un-twisted skein fairly firmly against a vertical surface...) it's still got rather a lot of kink to it. Goodness knows how it'll knit up. Kinky I guess.

You know that I'm a bookish person. So it'll come as no surprise to hear that I had books about spinning before I had a spinning wheel, or a spindle for that matter ... three of these date back to the 50's and 60's but the information in them is absolutely fascinating and still very relevant, if you ignore some of the rather dated patterns.

Two books ("The Woolcraft Book" and "Spindles and Shafts") are from New Zealand and "Your Handspinning" is British and they go into lots of detail about sheep breeds and preparing a fleece from scratch. A couple of years ago our son (then 9) was very keen on buying a whole fleece from Fibre East ... I'm not quite ready to say yes, but maybe one day.

This creamy blue-faced leicester (bfl) is on my wheel at the moment. I was intending to spin it on my spindle but have rather greedily snatched it for the spinning wheel instead. I'm getting better at spinning more consistently and it's my finest yet. The bfl is gloriously soft and silky although, despite trying to spin it worsted (with the grain), it's fairly fuzzy. It'd be nice to try a three ply with it but I don't think I'll have enough and I definitely need at least one more bobbin to do that ... 

I thought I'd check out the bobbins at Fibre East this coming Saturday (yippee!) along with getting some yummy fibre.  Oh dear, it's a rabbit hole this spinning lark. I'm in deep!

Two final things - I'm recording my hand-spun skeins on Ravelry here and I'm joining in with Sarah's spinning linky at Crafts from the Cwtch today. Maybe you'd like to join too?