Spinny spinny
First, the bragging: I took the results of my first three attempts spindling to the yarn shop where I'd bought my spindle to show them off, and all the people there were in awe that I'd not only produced yarn that nice on a spindle, but that I'd done it within a week of starting. (Of course, I kept the third attempt in the skein to hide the fact that it was badly over-twisted in the ply.)
Second, that dratted learning curve: Buoyed by my success with the coopworth, I settled down to spin a bunch of the soft creamy merino roving that liralen had sent me. Mmmm, this stuff is nice. Soft, drafts beautifully, holds a lot of twist and almost shimmers in the sunlight. It was SO much fun to spin that I kept spinning it until my spindle was too heavy to spin. So I started to wind it off into a plying bracelet, and when I was not even a quarter of the way through, it was already too much yarn for my hand. Crap. I wound it all back onto the spindle, got an empty toilet tissue roll, cut a slit in it to hold the yarn, and made a very low tech nostepinne. I stayed up until two in the morning winding all those singles into a center-pull ball. Then, of course, because my nostepinne was so low tech, I had to cut it apart to get the ball off of it. Now I'm plying it by pulling both ends of the ball out at once, and holding the egg of singles in my hand. There have been a few tangles, but largely, it's going pretty smoothly. Clearly, I need to get a real nostepinne.
(x-posted to spinningfiber)
Second, that dratted learning curve: Buoyed by my success with the coopworth, I settled down to spin a bunch of the soft creamy merino roving that liralen had sent me. Mmmm, this stuff is nice. Soft, drafts beautifully, holds a lot of twist and almost shimmers in the sunlight. It was SO much fun to spin that I kept spinning it until my spindle was too heavy to spin. So I started to wind it off into a plying bracelet, and when I was not even a quarter of the way through, it was already too much yarn for my hand. Crap. I wound it all back onto the spindle, got an empty toilet tissue roll, cut a slit in it to hold the yarn, and made a very low tech nostepinne. I stayed up until two in the morning winding all those singles into a center-pull ball. Then, of course, because my nostepinne was so low tech, I had to cut it apart to get the ball off of it. Now I'm plying it by pulling both ends of the ball out at once, and holding the egg of singles in my hand. There have been a few tangles, but largely, it's going pretty smoothly. Clearly, I need to get a real nostepinne.
(x-posted to spinningfiber)