But Tuesday is a lousy day for me; I don't think my boss would take too kindly to me saying "Sorry - I'm not going to be at work today. Today is Spinning Tuesday". And by the time I get home, I'm not much interested in spinning. Besides, I need better light for spinning than for knitting and it's dark when I get home.
But I want to spin. I've got some big dreams for the roving piling up in the closet and I'm not going to become a better spinner simply by wishing I could participate in Spinning Tuesday. So I am declaring Saturday to be "Spinning Saturday". No, not every Saturday and I can assure you there will be weeks where for one reason or another it will slide to Spinning Sunday, but this is the goal - to do more spinning and actually knit something with my handspun.
So this is what I did today. I had 40g (about 1.5 oz) of roving from Windblest Farms. Windblest is a farm quite close to where I live that raises Leicester sheep. I picked up this roving at the Almonte Fibre Festival last fall. I tried to spin it a few weeks ago and had no luck with it - it was lumpy and kept breaking; a very frustrating experience. But curiously, I could spin it on a spindle with no problems at all. This lead me to realize that I'm not pre-drafting well enough. You can see that its quite a dense roving.
I didn't get a good picture of the singles spun onto the bobbin but they looked really good. It was a fine strand and was surprisingly even. So I wound it off the bobbin into a center pull ball and plied it back onto the wheel. Herein lies the problem - it was plied too tightly so now there is too much twist in the finished yarn. I washed it, and hung it up with a weight (I used an old water jug) to see if I could get it to relax a bit.
I'm disappointed that there is so much twist, but the finished yarn is pretty even and about the gauge I was hoping to get. I think now it's just a question of practice before I get it the way I want it.
In other knitting news, I continued work on the Semele scarf today and finished the second chart. Now, comes the real test - can I count to four consistently to ensure an even increase?
Stay tuned - I'll post more pictures of this as a work in progress.
