Sunday night spinning

Last night Shana came over for dinner and an evening of spinning. It was cozy and relaxing. Alex worked on a crossword on the couch, calling out tricky clues, while Shana and I chatted and spun up a storm.



I love the contrast between our wheels - sleek light wood modern with a whirring sound, and dark old traditional style with a (charming!) creak.

I managed to spin up all the dyed roving from the weekend, filling my bobbin to the max.


I dyed the other singles so tonight.... I ply!

Been dyeing

As I sat spinning my plain merino roving the yesterday morning I thought: I'd like to dye this so it looks like my favorite plant: lavendar. Right. Time for another bout of learning.
I had ordered an acid dye sampler kit that came with the primaries and black. I have zero experience mixing colors so I read as much as I could on the internet, made some trips around town to get some acid dye appropriate cookware (and a respirator), and got to it.
I snagged a few leaves from my lavender out front, but the blooms have already faded in the heat so I had to work from memory on the color of the flowers. Since I had already spun a bobbin full of plain singles I decided I would immersion dye that with a medium saturation purple and then paint the other half of the un-spun roving using three different saturations each of purple and green. I wanted leave enough white that when I plied them together it would look heathered.

I played with the colors, going very gut-based since it was hard to tell what it would look like in the dark dye solutions. I decided that the purple would be more blue than red and have a touch of black. The green would also be more blue than yellow, and have a hefty dose of black.

Well.


I'm pleased as pie. The photo doesn't capture it exactly but the colors worked out! I'm amazed. The week of luck continues, I guess. It's super encouraging to have success mixing these colors out of red, blue, yellow, and black and I hope to cook up all kinds of color mixes in the future!

This morning I immersion dyed the singles. I'm a bit nervous about that since I don't know how it'll work out to ply after setting the twist. Hm. But I'm very happy with the color and can't wait to see how this all works out!

Off to start spinning my lavender yarn...

Squaaaaasquaaaasquaaaaaak

Happiest squaaaaaak I ever heard.

Lucky Day.

Look who joined the household:



Yesterday I saw a craigslist ad for this wheel, listing it at $100. I went out to look at it, thinking it would be fairly broken down but maybe I could poach the flyer for my mom's wheel.

I got there, and the wheel was in shockingly good condition. I bought it on the spot.
With a rigged up driveband, here's the proof of how lucky I got:


What are the chances of that?
I have a lot to learn about spinning on a double-drive wheel, and doubtlessly the wheel will improve with some cleaning, care, and adjustments. But WOW. I have a working wheel.

The man I bought it from knew very little about the wheel. His mother bought it from an antique shop on Cape Cod in the 1950s, but she wasn't a spinner so it sat there looking pretty ever since.

Clearly, though, someone made a good deal of yarn on this wheel at some point.

That's a groove on the flyer from where the spun single passes through the orifice and onto the bobbin. When I first saw it I teared up and was overwhelmed with the feeling of connection and sheer luck.

I hope to learn more about the history of the wheel, since I have no idea how old it is or where it came from. I have a bit of a project in finding bobbins that will work or, more likely, finding someone to make me bobbins that will work.

Having this wheel also allows me to take the careful time necessary to do a good job of restoring my mother's wheel. It's a project worth doing, and now that I have a working wheel I can have the patience to find the best helpers and the best information for getting that wheel back in order.

Now you'll have to excuse me - I have some spinning to do.

Brown Sugar over Buttermilk

Here's the last installment of the Sundarapalooza.

It's called Brown Sugar over Buttermilk and is one of her permanent colors. I'm not quite sure about this one yet... maybe this is part of a theme of me not being confident in my evaluation of browns. The whole thing is more mustardy than I was expecting and I'm not quite sure what to make of it. My husband called it "edgy" which certainly doesn't help clarify!
I'll hang on to it for a while and if it grows on me I'll knit it up. If not, I'll try to trade it for some other Sundara color.

Today I'm taking my old spinning wheel to Barbara (of Stony Mountain Fibers) to get her advice. I'm eager to hear what she has to say, good or bad. Either way I'm ready to move on to the next phase of the project!

Tuscan Rose over Lemon

Another luscious color from Sundara. The socks this will knit into will definitely be for me. I don't think I could let go of those colors. Swoon!

I did a bit of spindle spinning today with my brown BFL that I dyed with some burgundy and orange. I'd written off the color a few weeks ago but it has regrown on me. With browns the line between pretty and eeeeech challenges my taste. Sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but no one likes something that looks like last night's dinner revisted.
That was gross. I apologize. If you need to get the image out of your head, stare at Sundara's gorgeous yarn for a while.

Sundara yarn

Oh my. A couple of weeks ago I managed to score some sock yarn from Sundara's new website during an update. I just returned from vacation and found the package and WOWZA. This woman's dyeing skills definitely live up to they hype! I can't wait to knit with this, but I also plan on spending some quality time gazing at the skeins.
I'm going to post the yarns one at a time (three total) so check back if you want to see more pretty yarn.

This is the one limited edition sock yarn I managed to snag. For the uninitiated, that means this color is gone for good and Sundara won't be dyeing it again. It's called sky over lilac and I looooooooooove it.



It's hard to capture this in photos, but when I compared this yarn to some of my other sockyarn stash I saw all the varieties of colors in Sundara's dyeing. It's not just three or four different blues. It's a whole range of delicious variations. I tried to count and gave up around six. Better to just soak in the colors anyway.

The vest is growing slowly but surely.

Somehow I think that because this doesn't have sleeves it should take way less time than a sweater. I mean, shouldn't I be done already?? Bah. But the yarn is soft and it was a great project to work on while drinking gin and tonics with my toes in the sand. Ah...