Spinning

A few years ago all the talk about spinning on blogs put glorious visions of making colourful slubby handspun in my head, but I was pretty broke and buying a wheel was out of the question. So I headed down to Wondoflex and bought some undyed pre-carded roving (so cheap!) and a drop spindle.

Following instructions from a book on spinning from the 70s I found in a local secondhand bookshop, I taught myself to spin. Well, I think I did. I grabbed handfuls of roving and teased it into a sliver that didn’t break too often as it twisted. I didn’t know when I should stop, so I filled the spindle up pretty full. But my enthusiasm dwindled as I went. My arms hurt, the spinning was so slow, and I couldn’t watch tv at the same time.

By the time I was sure I couldn’t get any more yarn on the spindle I’d decided I didn’t like spinning much. The instructions on plying didn’t make sense, so I piled roving and spindle into a bag and hid it at the back of my stash.

Then on Saturday Lynne showed me how to Andean ply. As my spindle filled up with something that looked like yarn, I started to regain some of my enthusiasm. But it wasn’t just the joy of finally seeing my first rough skein of handspun come together. I’d fondled some of the predyed roving at the Forum, and now I felt the undyed roving I’d bought and realised why it was so cheap, and understood why people end up with stashes of roving as big as their stash of yarn.

Which is good timing, because an aquaintance of mine has offered me the spinning wheel of an ageing relative going into care.

Weaving:

I love thick, slubby yarn. Trouble is, I love the way it looks in a skein or ball, but I don’t like it knit up. Aside from bulky scarves, I can’t think of anything flattering that anybody could knit with it. However, when I bought my Knitters Loom I discovered straight away that bulky yarn looks so much better woven.

There’s been one last batch of yarn I bought at the Australian Country Spinners shop two years ago that I haven’t knitted up. It’s a chocolate thick and thin bulky yarn, so soft I don’t care if it turned out to be acrylic. I fancied a vest, but once I worked out how thick it would knit up I abandoned the idea. Along comes the loom and I know what I want to make: a blanket. I was already knitting a red blanket in strips, so I thought I’d make and stitch together squares out of the brown yarn.

The problem was, I couldn’t settle on a warp thread. When I was on holidays I tried the large ball of black patonyle. I’d used sock yarn before as a warp thread. Unfortunately, it stretched so much that I ended up with rectangles. And I realised that the fringe formed at either end of the squares would be too bulky to somehow sew into the edges.

Then yesterday I remembered that cone of thin brown yarn I’d bought from an op shop. I’d considered using it before, but worried it might be too thin and fragile to be used on the loom. Yesterday I decided to give it a try. If it broke, I’d put the project aside again.

It didn’t break, and by the end of the day I’d woven most of the wool into two thick lengths:

Which isn’t really enough to make a blanket, really. I’ve seen this yarn at Spotlight, so I’m going to weigh the pieces of weaving and buy as much again in another colour, and make two more lengths.

Chocolate:

How did the Japanese chocolate taste? Well, the first one, Morinaga, turned out to be so badly heat spoiled it practically disintegrated into powder. That went in the bin. The Meiji was fine. It was a lot better than I expected – definitely real chocolate – but there was a wierd flavour to it. Made me think of the fragrance of some kind of wood. Resinous. Strange. Of course, the ingredients listed ‘flavour’ but now what it was! Definitely not vanilla, I’m guessing.