I wrapped a bracelet! This is a fun little project and a good way to use up your stash. All you do is get a bracelet that is the width you like. Pick out your yarn. Glue one end of yarn to the inside of your bracelet. Wrap and wrap and wrap. When you are done just glue down the other end.

I had originally planned to make the bracelet with some of my handspun. But stretching the yarn around the bangle just totally took all the beauty and character out of the yarn. So then I turned to a pretty red bit of leftover from a scarf I made. It worked perfectly! The slight variegations made cool stripes.

Looks nice! This will be part of my teacher wardrobe. Only a few days left and I'll be teaching again!

From fleece to yarn. The above picture shows the raw fleece on the right. That's all from the same sheep!

The section on the left is the batt my classmates and I carded. We got to use the electric drum carder. Nice. It's power tools meets ancient tradition.

I pulled each batt into 3 or 4 strips and predrafted them. Isn't that little pile of balls great?

Beautiful and fluffy. Sorry about the washed out pictures. The real color is a bit more dark than these photos show you.

Behold! The finished yarn! I'm so pleased. Another balanced skein!

They plying looks a little loose. I think I need to get a little more twist in my singles so that the plying can be a bit tighter.

What should I knit with this? Maybe I'll do some mittens. It's so textured and so pretty!

Handspun yarn

My spinning class is over. Look how far I've come! Spinning on a wheel is so much easier than spinning on a drop spindle. I love it.

Update:  This yarn was delicious!  It became a hat.

Experiments in Spinning Yarn

I brought home so much fiber from my class. This is what I decided to do with the leftovers from some plying we did during the class period. I had 2/3 of each batt left over so I layed them on top of each other, split them down the middle and predrafted them together.

Here's a shot of the singles. I think maybe I should have left it as singles. Isn't that pretty? This was also an attempt at spinning a bulky singles. I think it's easier to get a thin singles to be consistent. Bulky singles might just always be novelty yarn when I spin it.

The finished skein is not so balanced. I know the photo is blurry but I think you can see the twist.

Here's how it looks plied. Pretty crazy! Maybe this will be a nice cuff.

Look at this wee ball of yarn! Isn't it cute? It's my first attempt at plying. It looks OK all balled up but it's not at all balanced. Who cares, I say! It's adorable and I'll probably knit it into a ring or bracelet. Or it'll just be an artifact of my beginning spinning.

Learning how to spin yarn

This is my second attempt at plying on my wheel. I spun the singles from romney provided by my teacher. The turned out really good and I was super excited to try plying them. I think I stopped about every 2 minutes to do a ply test.  May I suggest romney wool if you are a beginner?  It slides through your fingers nicely, but it still has a nice grip so it doesn't go chasing into the wheel.

It paid off! Look at that yarn just hang there! This is going to be some nice knitting yarn.

Gorgeous!

I finished my spinning class last night. It was wonderful! Although, now I need flick cards and combs and I'll probably need a drum carder and I'll definitely need to buy fleece to wash myself and I'm going to have to dye some things one of these days and....

I have some pictures of my yarn that I'll be posting in the next couple days. The yarns I'm the most proud of are two skeins of 2-ply that actually came out balanced! I did such an amazed happy dance when I pulled the yarn off my niddy noddy and it just hung there in a big loop. Awesome.

If you live in the Twin Cities area and are considering learning to spin please check out the classes at the Weaver's Guild of Minnesota. I highly recommend Beginning Spinning with Virginia Parent.

In other news, I should have a replacement spinning wheel in the next couple weeks. I'm sad that my wheel came broken but I'm very pleased with the service at the distributor where I bought it. So, all I have to do is just wait.