I adore this time of year. I suppose it's likely true for lots of people who knit/spin/weave/craft with wool, but the start of September means some very specific things for me: 1) the start of school (only one more day of holiday to go, not that I'm counting it down or anything like that); 2) a bite to the air that makes me think of wood fires and snuggling into wool sweaters and scarves and hats while the leaves blow on the autumn wind; 3) apple cider donuts (sadly not to be found in the UK, as far as I've been able to discover).

We've settled in to our new digs fairly well by this point. My studio, while being somewhat crowded by the vast piles of stuff that are amassing for the Great London Yarn Crawl, has sorted itself out into its usual state of disarray (there are towering piles around the computer on my desk, for instance, and bags of fleece waiting to be washed piled under the workbench, bits of yarn are strewn everywhere). The important thing is that I know where things are. Really I do...

I've managed to set up my spinning wheel it's it proper spot, however, and the result has been a whirlwind of spinning. On of my (sadly failed) Tour de Fleece goals was to time how long it takes me to make a handspun woven scarf, from fiber to FO. So over the course of the last three weeks, I've been timing my spinning of various fiber types.

*From left to right: Southern Cross FIber South African Merino/Corriedale in "Buccaneer", Hello Yarn BFL in "Scorch" and Hello Yarn Panda in "Villain"*

All of these were spun as 2-ply yarns at my default single wpi. The really interesting thing to me is that my production speed varied depending on the fiber type. The fastest singles were from the SA Merino/Corriedale (4.15 yds/min), with the Panda next (3.75 yds/min) and the BFL the slowest (3.5 yds/min). Plying was less variable, ranging between 3.75 and 4 yds/min.

My other motivation behind this timing experiment is that having all my stash in one room and visible has brought home the hard reality that I have more handspun yarn then I will ever use, and it needs to go to new homes. So I'm setting up to sell handspun over at Porpoise Fur, and the big question to be answered is How much will it cost? I'm very aware of the issues in pricing handmade goods, and trying to find the balance between what the market will bear and what is a reasonable compensation for time and skill put in to making the product. So all these variations in timing are very interesting from that perspective - stay tuned over at the Porpoise Fur blog for more details in the next few days.

The other result of sitting in a room full of yarn has been much knitting! I've knit two shawls in the last couple of weeks, finished off a languishing pair of socks, and started a Tiny Tea Leaves Cardigan for Boo (Devil's will follow shortly). My design brain is going bonkers too, and I've cast on a new shawl design that is flying along...whee!

So what's on your needles with the advent of the new season?

In the comments on my last post that showed one of the colorways spun up, Gigi commented that she has a hard time visualizing how colors will blend, both in the yarn and in the final finished object. So for today, I've got another example of how one of my colorways spins up (with a bonus shot of an FO!) - this time it's one of the semisolid series, Coomassie Blue.

Blue is absolutely my favorite color, and I love this combination of tones and shades - light blue, some spots of navy, a dash of turquoise every so often - so I was really looking forward to spinning this up. Targhee is a really sproingy, bouncy fiber, so I spun this up as a 2-ply to use for a scarf for a friend.

Here's the 2-py finished yarn. Doesn't look like much, does it? The dark and light bits of the dyed top look like they've mostly mixed themselves all up together. Not terribly promising...but take a look at how the yarn looks in the finished scarf.

I used the 2-ply as the warp in this scarf that I wove on a rigid heddle loom. You can see how the yarn that looked like it would work up as a mostly solid fabric has really beautiful, subtle stripes across the width of the scarf.

Here's a close up of the scarf where you can really see the stripes fading in to one another. This is one of my favorite characteristics of semisolid colorways - from a distance this will read as solid blue, but come close and you can start to distinguish the different shadings of color.

I hope everyone has a great weekend, and happy spinning!

Rachel

Welcome September

Spun up colourways: Coomasssie Blue