Fledgling Spinner

As surely as one will eventually lament the speed of their needlecraft, one will automatically begin to question their genetic destiny towards things like arthritis and carpal tunnel. I decided that I needed a night off spinning, carding and knitting. I have managed a sweater back in the impossible to remember basketweave pattern and one and a half spools of single ply yarn in the black fleece. I have quietly nursed a desire for a drumcarder to increase my spinning productivity and decided that first I must make the hand carders worth their weight in credit card spending. Although I fear for the overall size of the sweater and wonder at its likely stretchiness and my inability to knit a swatch to check for guage, I also remember the most important thing:

If I finish this sweater and it doesn’t fit Richard, I can always give it to a smaller man for christmas.

With the best of intentions, I have washed and carded the majority of Oreo, the black and white alpaca mama from the big bag. I started to spin what I can only describe in my amateur interpretation as her short and crimped fuzz bounty and am loving the softness. So many lines in the things I have read lend a certain amount of importance to the length of the locks you spin (staple length?) and hers are not too long but bathed in softness. The resulting single is still beset with some lumps and partial variation in thickness but I am determined to make two bobbins full and spin them together to make beautiful yarn. I have carded them after many minutes spent doing what one website calls monkey-picking – using my fingers to pull out the white bits from her fleece (she was named oreo for a reason) and any rogue pieces of grass or whatever – and rolled them in the worsted way (widthwise rather than lengthwise).

As far as set up, I have devoted an inherited tea cart to holding my spinning and knitting in the living room. A quick trip to a local craft store and I had one of those flat , square baskets to hold my roving. As I meandered through the aisles, a woman noticed my basket and asked me if I had read the newspaper. I replied that I had not to which she responded with an amazing declaration that there had been an article extolling the organizing virtues of baskets. “They can hold magazines and other stuff”, she told me. I was gobsmacked. I told her, “I just needed a basket. This was premeditated”. It was surreal. My husband pointed out that the news article was correct. Baskets have been used for organizing – for about six thousand years. We purchased and left. His archaeological accuracy aside, it was weird – no one should need a newspaper to tell them how to use a basket.

The basket use was short lived once it was filled with roving (carded bits of fleece rolled widthwise and predrafted…I think). I spun. And then I turned to knitting. I recently acknowledged that it may be the majority of a decade since I last knit a sweater for my spouse. He selected some wool and a pullover pattern from an older issue of Interweave. Spinning may have to give way to some knitting time as I have ground to make up. At this rate, we would be married half a century and he would only have five or six sweaters to show for it.

…or a week. It has now been seven days – give or take a couple of hours – since I started down this road. It is an incredible thing to see what changes as you learn and also how restrained you can be when it comes to the urge to pet and/or cuddle the first two ply skein that looks so fluffy and soft and inviting.

I give you the yarn bounty:They are organized from right to left in order of completion with a sock stuck in for the day where I began to worry about wobbly spinner’s knee and the funny click my ankle was making. I told my husband that I will have a new rule so as not to overdose on spinning – knit one day, spin the next. Barring work interruptions, I figure that will allow me to process all the alpaca goodies sometime before mid-winter when I hope to present a multi-coloured shawl to the gifter of fleece.

I hope that it will seem interesting to her; a shawl with all the natural colors from cream to black to brown of her alpaca flock (are they a flock?). That is my beginner spinning goal. I also had my first fleece coveting experience today. Never having spun before and then being chock full of fleece, I have never looked on fleece sites to shop.

A quick peek at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair website led me to a woman – Miss Babs – website which has all manner of beautiful colorways and dyed roving & top for spinners. These things will, of course, come later, when my singles lack the slubs (wee patches of thickness along my attempts at thin, even spinning).

I can still look though.

There can be no doubt that some things alter your plans irrevocably. I wanted to be a simple knitter, now I have shunned laundry and dishes for most of the holiday weekend on favor of this:

It was fantastic! Without the stress of perfection as so many writer’s had cautioned against the notion that your first yarn would be anything but lumpy and thick, I went full tilt and spun and spun rolags until they were all used up. Then I carded more and tried to think about small, thin, even single ply yarns.

I drafted with my right hand, I drafted with my left. I tried the treadle with each foot in turn lest one side of my body have a heretofore unknown innate ability to spin. I decided that there was no genetic imprint for spinning but know now that should tragedy befall one joint on one side or the other, I can learn on the other.
Sometime on Saturday I produced a reasonably even pair of single ply yarns. Loading both bobbins on the lazy kate, I proceeded to make my first two ply. Thick and not particularly even, it was nonetheless balanced as the books tell me, spinning in no particular direction when I took it off the niddy noddy.

I laid out my skeins of first yarns and made two ply soup.

Labor Day saw me dispense with my chores in short order so I could return to this:

A single ply on a full bobbin which pleases me greatly. It is destined for navajo ply, something I was first brave enough to try this morning on the leftovers from the two ply adventure. I will scarce be able to pay attention at work tomorrow which makes me think of only one thing – Columbus Day.