The Best Way To Spend a Day

I did not quite do what I meant to do yesterday.  It was a kind of a mashup sort of day  A little of this, a little of that.

I did mean to ply the fibre I had already wound into a cake.  It is thick and thin, but never too thin so as to be unusable.   

I may be quite in love with it. This was not premium fibre.  It was a bit neppy, and had quite a bit of vegetable matter in it. I picked some out as I spun but there are a few pieces that made it through, that I will pick out as I knit.

I have an opinion on vegetable matter in fibre and the way some people go on about it.  It won't kill you.  A bit of straw here and there never hurt anyone.  If you are worried about the wool being unsanitary, well, it isn't.  And if you are that worried about it, why are you working with raw wool? 

Wool comes from farms.  Farms are not the picture perfect postcards that some people think they must be in order to be a good farm.  There is hay.  There is straw.  There will be mud and dirt.  There is poop.  It will be skirted off if a farmer wants to be able to send his wool to the mill for a good price and I have yet to meet a farmer who is so foolish as to think he doesn't want a good price for everything his farm produces.  The really really good places will wash the sheep before shearing or will coat them to help keep the fleeces pristine but many times, on many farms this is not practical.   

Sorry/not sorry about that.

I m really pleased with the result from that little bag of fibre.  It was an unnamed source, and an unnamed fibre, beyond that I know it was wool.  The result is a pretty nice little bit of yarn that will make great mittens or a hat for this winter.  And yes, I do mean to knit it for this winter. The last thing I need is for spinning to produce more stash that will sit forever because there isn't enough of it for anything.  The 75 grams in this bag netted me only 66 yards, a small amount to be sure, but the thick sections that consumed so much fibre can only add to the warmth of the end product.   

The part of the day that did not go like I thought was the red Polworth.  I was ready to spin, but after the first plying went reasonably well, I decided to work on the singles spun from 3 small varying sized bags of fibre.  They were different colours and I thought it would be a bit of an adventure to see what happened in the finished product.     

I really ought to have taken the picture of the singles in the cake.  It was very pretty. I spun the fibre as a gradient of light to darkest fibres.  Each fibre was a different amount and I just wanted to get them used up to tidy up my fibre containers.  I cannot stand untidy in stored things, which is weird since in my usual surroundings are fairly untidy.   In  creative way.  Yeah.  That is my story and I am sticking to it.  The bgs are used up in a most delightful way.

The finished 2 ply yarn starts with a section of grey on grey, then slips to a pouffier cream on grey and then punches out an ending with a section of the darkest natural sheep colour.  The cream was a BFL fibre, the grey a shetland bit, and the darkest a richly coloured Coopworth.  

Together, they make a really delightful yarn.  Thick and thin.  That seems to be my go to at the moment.  It's 97 grams might be a mere 67.5 yards long, but every inch was a lot of fun. 

Do you know what the best thing about this yarn is?  Both yarns actually.  They are so much more the lofty airy yarn I wanted to make when I started out.  I wanted to break out of my spinning comfort zone and see if I could go somewhere just  bit different and I did.

It was an adventure in every way and adventures are the best way to spend the days.