Spin all the things!

I was doing some cleaning.

For some reason I'm not able to recall, I started digging in my stash boxes and discovered that my roving is happily inhabited by dermatid beetles. The beetles eat flowers or some such but their larvae are rather ugly fuzzy things that eat wool. They prefer cashmere, though, or cat hair. If you are interested in the little buggers, google them yourself. I know them and due to insectophobic people, or just Oooooh-creepy! people, I'm not even linking.
I inspected the rovings and my precious Scottish cashmere seems to be untouched but I decided that the safest way of dealing with the problem is to spin more. After all, disturbing the buggers disturbs them, complicates their sexual lives and maybe light and air kills them, who am I to know.

I however decided that it would be a damn good idea to go through the fibres via spinning them. I made daily allotments and I'm keeping with the plans quite well.


This is natural brown Shetland roving. The proper name of this fibre colour is moorit. So far, I have some 100m of two ply, which may have used up around a half of the total of 120g of fibre. I have some natural black roving, which is in fact deep chocolate brown, true grey, sort of grey and white, which just calls for some knitting project in all natural colours.


This yarn is probably Blue-faced Leicester. I got it from a Norwegian Raveller whose name I forgot (sorry), redyed it towards green and continued in my usual manner - singles with Z-twist, loose double. It drafts somewhat less eagerly so in fact, it's PITA to spin and my fingers hurt. But the result is pretty and fluffy and anyway.


Bleached yak. Spins like butter. The fibres have short staple length so it needs to be spun carefully. I intend to keep it a single.

To those who don't understand the fibery language: Look what pretty things I made.
Yes I'm still grumpy and down. I even have half a bar of chocolate on my table and it tastes icky. Means this is a damn bad day. The cat however didn't end it the way it started and refrained from further puking in my bed. Either she did something else or she likes clindamycin because she's licking my shoulder.

Lousy day, but colourful

I took various bland yarns and redyed them because, well, I have no use for pale ochre, pale baby blue, pale apricot and such.
The huge mainly blue thing is my pencil roving. I would love to spin a reasonable skein for an upcoming sweater because I need something in this colour and I have none such in my stash but I spin too slowly.
I dyed pieces of the same roving in different colours, one greyish handful and one bright green, and today I spun this:
13,5 metres, Navajo-plied because a colour gradation appeared and I wanted to preserve it. It took me two hours. Spinning for other use than having pretty little skeins doesn't work for me yet, apparently.

New hobby

I learned to spin, folks.
It was a lengthy process. Years ago, three or four it might be, I got a spindle and some fibre, tried it, it was no big deal, so I traded some of that fibre and kept the nice batts from Beau North Star Alpacas which Alpaca Granny graciously gave me.... and nothing happened for a few years.
Last weekend, I was rummaging around for some reason and found that bag of spindle and fibre. It wasn't actually lost, I knew perfectly well about it.. but this time it attracted my attention and I just gave it a try.



And I made yarn.

Apparently, things have their time. On Friday, I dropped at friend's town, we went for a walk and in the old town, when a car was passing us in a narrow street, we stopped by an art supply shop. I peeked in the window just because it was there and there were a few handfuls of coloured fibre with a tag saying something like Fibre for felting. I went in and found out that they had coloured fibre but also bags of natural grey, chocolate and cream. I got a bag of each.





And made more yarn.