Yarn!

Well, canning season has begun.  This weekend we made: applesauce, apple butter, apple cake, apple pie, apple cobbler, froze several jars of peaches, and (finally, because I was tired and just wanted the fruit done): apple-peach-pear jam.  The apple-peach-pear jam is very red and tastes rather sweet, even though I used less sugar and more fruit than was called for.  We're calling it "candy jam."  The final batch is cooking right now; I will put pictures up later.

So, as I am waiting for my jam to finish up, I decided to try to take some artsy pictures of the yarn I've been working on.  First is a yellow corriedale with some flowers spun in.  Straight yellow (not pictured) was a little too much for me; I think the flowers make a nice addition.

Next I mixed the yellow corriedale with some merino to break up the yellow a bit.  It makes a much softer yellow color:

 



 Below is a mix my daughter came up with.  We dyed some of our mohair into rainbow strips, and then I plyed the dyed rainbow with grey mohair and flowers. 

 

 

 

And here's the rainbow mohair again, this time plyed with black mohair.  Personally, I like this one better than the rainbow/grey combination. 

 

 

"Tinsel" yarn

I was perusing one of the local craft stores last week, and noticed that they had some eyelash on clearance.  So I bought some to put in my angora-merino yarn blend as I was plying, just to see how it would turn out.  My husband says it looks like tinsel. I have to agree with him. Not sure what's going to happen with it yet. Maybe my sister (who actually crochets, unlike me), will have some good ideas. It would certainly make an interesting hat!

First Spinning Lesson

Yesterday I had my first spinning lesson at Feederbrook Farm.  It was a very lovely place, and the lesson was quite low-key.  They are a Kromski dealer, so we used Kromski wheels. From what I had read about on-line and elsewhere, I really expected to like the Kromski Sonata (which I had a chance to try). It wasn't bad, but I found that I actually preferred the Symphony, which I did not expect.

So here is my first yarn:

This one was done on the Symphony. It was not as difficult as I had anticipated.  Most of the beginning-to-spin things I had read talk about how people have trouble adjusting to doing two things at once - moving both their feet and their hands - in separate ways. That was not what I had the most trouble with. I had more difficulty figuring out the rhythm of the wheel and when to let the yarn feed in and when to keep it out and build the tension.  This a little more evident in my second piece (below). The picture doesn't show it all, but there are many changes from very thin to very thick. I'd like to say that's because I was playing with the yarn thicknesses, but mostly that is not true.