Handspun, Homemade, and other stuff.

I finally finished spinning up the 2 ounces of merino I've been working on. Yeah, I know! It took me THAT long to do 2 ounces! But to be fair, I only get a chance to spin when the planets align just right and the moon is in it's proper phase, etc. In other words, only when the munchkin isn't around. And usually when that happens, I have about a million other things that HAVE to be done first. So, anyway, I finished spinning my 2 ounces of merino. The color was "forest multi" and it was quite lovely in the bag, burgundy with flecks of pink and green and all sorts of reddish-brown tones.

It's more muddy spun than I expected it to be, but I still think it's quite pretty, even if it's not so bright.

I plied two singles together to get the final product. Jonas decided he needed to help me with this process, but fortunately, he grew bored with it pretty quickly.

Please ignore the absolute disaster that is my office area. It seems that everything in the house finds a way to land in this little corner at some point or another. I'm really not that slobbish. :)

The result is still drying as we speak. I'm not sure on my exact WPI, but it's quite thin. Somewhere between lace and fingering weight, with the occasional slightly chunkier spot. My only problem with plying them is that I do not have a tensioned Lazy Kate, and my singles, on several occasions, decided to snarl up on each other. Perhaps an indication of overspinning? But my plied yarn was balanced, so I guess all's well that ends well, right?

I know this isn't a good picture, but here's the end result wound onto the niddy noddy.



If I'm doing my math right, by counting the number of wraps on the niddy noddy, I've got right around 125 yards here. Not enough for any big project, but enough to play around with, I suppose. No idea what it'll become. Probably a lacy headband or something. What else do you do with 125 yards? Suggestions?

I guess that as I continued spinning I became much better at keeping my single an even thickness because my second bobbin, despite having the same 1 ounce of fiber spun, ended up having quite a bit leftover after plying. I took that leftover single and practiced Navajo plying. The technique isn't all that hard to understand, but it kicked my butt in a big way. I think with some more practice I could learn to really love it, though.



The rest of my day was pretty busy, too. J and I worked on getting the rest of the vegetable garden planted. I hauled hundreds and hundreds of pounds of dirt, and my back knows it, too. But,with the exception of a couple of pepper plants and a few herbs, the garden is done. Hopefully it will do better than previous years. We intended to get it planted earlier this year, but time has been an issue all around, it seems. Oh well. We still have a few months to get these babies established before the blazing summer heat destroys them completely.

Aside from that, we baked some fresh bread,
and J and dad took a loaf to Abuela while I sat down and did some transcription. I have GOT to finish this before it kills me! I don't know why I'm procrastinating so much.

And one last picture, just because.

In cleaning out their attic, my parents came across a ton of my old stuffed animals and whatnot, and sent them home for me to sort through. Now, it was fun to go through the bags and remember all of them, etc. But honestly! I don't need another 50 pounds of plush in this house! I let J go through them to see if there was anything he wanted before I gave them away, and he promptly picked this!

Wait, it gets better! When you squeeze him, he farts. Of course, Stimpy was in there too, and now also resides in my son's room. Oh well, there are worse things he could fall in love with, right?