I know the standard is "pix or it didn't happen", but it's almost midnight and pictures will have to wait until tomorrow. But let the record show that at 11:32 pm GMT on 24 April, 2010, I finished spinning a veritable marathon of purple singles. Hooray!
In a week or so, I'll start the UltraMarathon of 2 stage plying. But for the moment, I think I'll celebrate by spinning something completely different.
Or maybe I'll knit something...
Here's the progression of my spinning week:
Monday night,
By Thursday night,
As of right now (6:00 pm GMT on Friday):
This is all that's left.
I am ahead of schedule, and I'm finishing tomorrow if it kills me.
ETA: I forgot to put in this picture of where I was spinning today:
OK, started off with 4.5 oz of purple fiber for my Vine Yoke cardigan left on Monday afternoon.
Monday night: 3.8 oz (watched Fantastic Four, which was ok)
Tuesday night: 3.1 oz (watched FF sequel, which was rubbish)
So, at the rate of 0.7 oz/2 hours, I should be down to 2.4 oz or less tonight, and 1.7 oz tomorrow night. Friday night is off because Himself and I are going on a date for the second time in eight days (!) and will be at a wine tasting. So saturday night I'll be down to 1 oz to go, which means I should be able to bust out the last ounce on Sunday. And that would set me up for starting to ply the next weekend, but we'll be out of town for part of it, so I'll aim for starting to ply on Bank Holiday Monday (aka May 3rd). I'm hoping that the plying will go a bit faster then the spinning, because four months is already too long to spend on one spinning project. Seriously!
There are definitely lots of things growing around here at the moment. Camellias,
Magnolias,
Tulips,
Laptop bags,
Cherry blossoms,
Pitcher plants,
Handspun sweaters,
and children.
Given the last, I'm embarking on another craft for a few days - sewing new summer dresses for the girls.
You'll be glad to know, however, that there are some things that are shrinking around here, i.e. my massive ball of purple top.
I'm now down to only 4.5 ounces to go. And since I'm imposing a moratorium on knitting for the next few days (my wrist is acting up again), I'm hoping against hope that it will get finished this week. Then I'll take a week or so before embarking on Neverending Plying.
In my frenzy of stash organizing and decluttering I came across quite a lot of undyed fiber in a box. A couple pounds of Falkland, some merino/tussah silk, a pound and a half of Targhee. There was also a pound of domestic wool that I received when I bought my wheel way back when. It occurred to me that the girls might enjoy dyeing fiber for their own sweaters for next winter. The fact that the activity might eat up an afternoon was also quite popular with the holiday-parental unit.
I pulled out my sample cards and showed them which colors I had. They each picked four (both, strangely enough, went for fuschia) and I sent them off to watch Tom and Jerry while I made up stock solutions. And then the fun began.
We started off by soaking the fiber in a big plastic tub - I added some citric acid to the soaking water to be sure that the dyes would strike - and once the fiber was wet, the painting started.
The girls had to be convinced to part with their top.
Devil did hers in the crockpot with brilliant blue, fuschia, turquoise and scarlet Jacquard Acid dyes.
We cooked it on high for about an hour and a half. I was kind of worried that there wasn't enough liquid in the pot, so I added about half a cup of water. The end result was that the bottom layers of the top ended up much darker then the top layer or two.
I'm not sure how it will spin up, and she's not all that thrilled with it at the moment, but we'll see how she feels once it's yarn.
Boo chose yellow, orange, green and pink. And then used all the colors I'd made up instead. Her top was done in the oven in a roasting pan, and the colors that came out were, um, a bit bright.
Thirty minutes in the oven at 190, the kitchen smelled like wet sheep, and we had this:
Boo is pretty thrilled with this, when I can get her to stand still long enough to venture an opinion. We'll see how the yarn ends up, but I suspect it will be quite cheerful (if nothing else!).
The final results:
This dyeing session and my recent organizing made me appreciate even more the talents of the dyers I get fiber from. I put all of my Hello Yarn Fiber Club unspun tops together. There's quite a bit...
That's something like 5 or 6 pounds of fiber. And if I get really brave, I might even be able to combine some of those colorways to get some interesting yarns for larger garments.