Chitchat and the occasional in-depth analysis about fiber, knitting, spinning, crochet, cooking, feminism, self-image, and a modicum of personal blathering.

Monday, August 18, 2008

It takes time to do the poisoning

I've been remiss, life's been very hectic. Kid chaos, family gatherings, more kid chaos, and finally, the olympics.

I love the olympics and spend as much time watching them as possible, winter or summer doesn't matter. I just love watching them. Blogging suffers, as does knitting to some extent, but I can do extra spinning.

I joined the Ravelympics on Ravelry this year, in the events "handspun heptathalon" and "sock put". I combined the two into one, spinning yarn to make into socks. The result is Seaweed Socks, pattern coming soon.

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The fiber is a combination of electric blue and dark green combed top, mixed with a carded roving in blues, purples, greens, sparkle, and a bit of yellow here and there. I weighed, pulled the fiber into random lengths, divided them into equal amounts, and spun two singles which I then plied. I like the result, some of the dreaded stripes but in a different way. I wanted it to be reminiscent of a kelp forest with bands of light and shadow and that's kinda what happened. At least if I squint, it is.

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Anyway. Yesterday I was really tired of knitting on the same pair of socks, so I spun some yarn. I had this cool three color roving, two shades of brown and cream together that I'd been carding and put aside for a while. I finished it up. It's a sport/DK weight, probably 450-500 yards. Haven't measured yet but it's a BIG skein.

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I'm really trying to stretch myself as a fiber "artist". I have a lot of interesting stash fiber even after the fire sale a couple of months ago, and I combined some of it to make rolags that I'm going to spin. (Rolags are like mini-batts, they're what you get when you use hand cards to prepare fiber.) In this case, I just made a few passes with the cards because I wanted the color to be somewhat disparate. I can't wait to see how this spins up.

Here's the fibers I'm working with-
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and here's the first batch of rolags.

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Sparkly, huh?

Ok, back to work/olympics. Today's my day off, after all.

1 comment:

Lorie McCown said...

Your yarn is fabulous, I love those green and blues..looks great!