Sunday, August 05, 2007

Spinning again

It's been a while since I've posted and a lot has been going on. Now that things have settled down just a bit I've gotten back to handspinning. I spun some Targhee, then decided it was time to spin some CVM I've had waiting for just the "right time". This fiber was from a fleece I'd purchased, washed and then carded up on a drum carder. It's been waiting for quite a while.

I spun up some samples, which was a bit interesting, as I've not spun from carded bats much. I settled on a 2-ply worsted weight yarn. The singles are spun on the 6:1 ration of my Mazurka spinning wheel, with about 21 degrees of twist, about 17 wpi. The finished 2-ply is 8 wpi. I've been using techniques I learned from Rita Buchanan in a spinning for knitting class to match my sample.

I've spun 4 bobbins, and have enough more fiber to do another bobbin, possibly 2. I'll ply it up mixing up the bobbins so the first is plied with the 3rd or whatever is the middle one, and so on.

I'm still deciding how to knit it up. I'm thinking a from-the-top, seamless sweater ala Barbara Walker. This CVM is a medium silver-gray, too dark to show cables all that well. The yarn is a bit randomly heathered, so should be quite interesting enough without much fussiness.

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