Hey - remember that moment of humility yesterday?

You know - this one?

Oh, damn - don’t tell me you blinked. If you did, then you missed it, probably for good and all. I’m afraid I’m all cock-a-hoop again now.

Look what came back like a bad penny:

Yup - the penny. And it’s there to show off, to illustrate the fact that within minutes of posting yesterday I sat down to the wheel again… and something went CLICK again… and I’m wild again, beguiled again, a… sorry, I’ll try to stop with the knee-jerk song quotations, but there’s no getting around the fact that I’m pretty durned pleased with this for a first day’s work.

This second bobbin…

… is not as full as it looks, at least not as full of wheel-spun singles. I wound my spindle-spun singles onto it before adding to it. That is probably going to prove to have been a mistake, as some of those singles were overambitious - too thin, too overspun, generally unstable. There are several knots hidden here - yes, knots. What the hell. I’ll ply it all together and learn something.

I’m ALWAYS learning something. Can’t help it.

 
I have not been false to my earlier loves, incidentally. I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion. I’m still using the resin spindle for the Chinese menu of samples - will post the sequel to that story next time.

And I’m still knitting.

Here is the side-by-side comparison of the two sweater swatches:

A closer look:

What I’m hoping for is something in-between. I love the richness of the new green, but not at the cost of all the misty greyness of the original. I love the shading of the original, but wouldn’t be sorry to see it pool less. With Jennifer at the dye pot I am confident that I can have it both ways.

They say… you can’t eat your cake and have it.

But I think sometimes They… are wrong.

 
P.S. for Waldmaus… look what I spotted in a neighbor’s driveway today!

Yes, that’s Firebird perched above the taillight.

And yes…

… it’s a Harley.

VRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOMMMMMMM!

Back when I still lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, there was a marvelous shop on Columbus Avenue called The Last Wound-Up. (All New Yorkers from a certain era, stand by for collective sigh. Ready? With me, on three. One. Two. Three. SI-I-I-I-I-IGH. Thank you.) The gradual disappearance of whimsical shops like that one has gone a long way toward mitigating any regret I may ever have felt for moving out of what was after all my original home town.

The Last Wound-Up sold… wind-up toys. Nothing else. Just every imaginable kind of wind-up toy. Boats and whales and sea-monsters for your bath. Little sideways-scuttling crabs. Tiny lurching hulking Godzillas to drive your cat insane with uncertainty. And of course… spinning tops.

On their bags and business cards, in their window, all over the walls of the shop, this motto was prominently displayed:

          DON’T POSTPONE JOY!

 
This package arrived here today - sooner than expected - all the way from Holland:

Yup. Mai spinninz weel, let me sho u it.

Actually, first let me get it unpacked and set up.

No picture or description can possibly do justice to the care - and originality - with which this thing was secured for transit. It gives new meaning to the phrase “within an inch of its life.”

Naturally, some assembly required - but it wasn’t difficult, and there’s nothing like putting this sort of thing together to give you an insight into how the mechanism works. Actually having to put the pieces into place is an excellent shortcut toward understanding which ones belong where and why.

So here it is:

It’s a Romney castle wheel, built in New Zealand at least 23 years ago (that’s when they shut up shop, I gather, and more I do not know on the subject; if you do, I would welcome any further info!). Single treadle, single drive, Scotch tension. Not, as the seller rightly says, a beginner’s wheel - but then, I don’t aim to stay a beginner for long.

Please observe the 18th-century milking stool in the foreground. What better spinning chair?

Note also…

… the sweet built-in lazy-kate. As well as…

… the matching orifice hook, stored in its own little “orifice” when not in use.

Over and above its beauty and practicality, there’s a primitive simplicity about the whole thing that completely charms me. I’ve looked at some of the fancy new wheels out there now, and they are very impressive indeed… but they seem to require high-tech components that I find a bit intimidating. Apparently they use specialized drive bands and I don’t know what-all. The drive band on this? A piece of string. The bobbin tensioner? Ditto, with a knotted rubber band on one end to give it spring. If either of them breaks it can be replaced out of the kitchen junk drawer. I can’t tell you how this appeals to me.

My car is a 1990 Honda, standard shift, no power steering, no air conditioning, no mod cons whatsoever.

My microwave oven dates to 1980; it doesn’t have a control panel or dedicated settings for defrosting precisely one and a half servings of quiche - just two mechanical dials, one for how strong and one for how long.

My sewing machine is a 1939 Singer Featherweight; it doesn’t do zig-zag and it doesn’t do buttonholes - it goes forward and back like a champ, and that’s all it does and all it needs to do.

I’m still in mourning for the DOS computer of yesteryear.

Somehow… I think I’m really going to like this wheel.

I suppose if it were an Ashford Joy it would play better into the “Don’t Postpone Joy” thing. But not even for the sake of the joke….

Seriously, though, I think it was largely that notion of not postponing joy, of seizing the day, that suddenly precipitated me over the edge into spinning as soon as the first tools actually came to my hands. It just flashed on me - so many fibers, so little time. So much to learn, and just what the hell was I waiting for? Life is too short.

Is anybody surprised that I put in a bid on a wheel within two days of my first spindling?

I’m not.

I’m also not surprised that I bought the wheel I did. I had planned, of course, to follow the conventional wisdom: audition a lot of wheels, learn everything I can about their various features and how to use them, take my time, gain some experience, make an educated decision. Instead… I saw this and wanted it and went with my gut. Boom. Set a price ceiling and told myself that if the bid was high enough it was meant to be. The bid was more than high enough, and the rest is history.

In one respect at any rate I followed the sage advice I’ve been given: I spent some time today treadling my little heart out, and I foresee more of that ahead - a lot more. I’m feeling my way, and definitely getting a feel for it - now all I gotta do is practice practice practice. Carnegie Hall is out there somewhere.

And to those of you who have declared me a mutant freak, proposed to burn me as a witch, averred that I must have sold my soul to the devil, etc. - as well as to those who have said kind and encouraging things about my early singles - I have two things to say.

1. Talent? Yeah, whatever - I dunno. Sure, I have some natural aptitude for this sort of thing, always did. But there is something happening here that I can’t quite explain. From the moment I first started to feel the twist I had the oddest sense that this was something I had done before - frequently, habitually. On the face of it, all this spinning stuff is new to me - the individual fibers and their behaviors certainly are - but the actual doing of it seemed to come to me not so much with the ease of the quick learner as with the comfort of long practice. I’m telling you, my hands knew things I didn’t, and they can spin better than my mind can; if you could ask them they would probably tell you where and how they have done this in the past. I don’t have experience, but they do. Did I spin in another life? Or am I drawing on some kind of deep tribal memory? I don’t know exactly what I believe about these things, so I don’t have the answer and I don’t know if there is one. I just know that something is going on, between me and the fibers, that is beyond my normal comprehension. Cue Twilight Zone theme.
2. Behold my comeuppance for those preternaturally fine and even spindle singles:

   

   Ahhhhhh… that’s more like it. Nice crappy first-time beginner singles. Right? Overtwist alternating with breakage. Fat slubs that clog the orifice. And I trust you’ll have noticed that there is not a penny to be seen within a 10-foot radius of this bobbin. Either I never had a wheel in that hypothetical other existence, or I didn’t have a single-treadle, or… or maybe I’m just a bona fide noob after all and I have to learn this part the hard way just like everyone else.

 
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some KNITTING to do.

While practicing my treadling, of course.

No spinning today until AFTER some tswatching for the tsweater.

I’ve done more since I took the picture, but I think I still need to do a couple more inches before I can really evaluate this. Initially I was troubled by some of the differences between the new yarn and the old. It is definitely an entirely different color. It is GREEN, where the other was a curious green-grey mix. It is very nearly solid, where the other was more visibly shaded. So it isn’t what I expected or planned, and at first I wasn’t sure I was happy with the change. But it’s growing on me. The color is certainly beautiful in itself, and it certainly works well with the bell colors. (NB, speaking of greens, the green in the colorwork here is still the old, too-light-&-bright, shade. The new one is drying even as we speak.) We’ve drifted a long way from its roots, which were somewhere in the area of bronze-bell patina, and we’ve apparently left the quarries of granite and limestone far behind us.

Then again, sometimes “beautiful” is really all you need to know.

Hmmmm. Just went back and looked at some of the old pictures of the previous swatch. The color actually looks pretty similar. But that’s in the pictures, not in real life. Once I have a more substantial swatch to compare I’ll take new pictures of both, side by side. I’m learning to make more accurate use of my Ott light, and I think it will make a big difference to what you see.

 
Meanwhile, back on the spindles….

Working in reverse chronological order from the above, I give you this morning’s arrival from Copper Moose:

Spindle and partial dog included for scale - even though I’ve seen people toting around those enormous featherlight bags of roving at every fiber festival I’ve been to, I’m still struggling to process the weight/volume ratio of this stuff. Can’t seem to keep my mind wrapped around the fact that a relatively small amount of fiber takes up so much space because it’s so… fluffy.

So here’s what I got:

This is Corriedale, and the colorway is Cabernet:

This is Ashland Bay Merino/Tencel, in a colorway called Blueberry:

I’m not telling you how much I got, especially of the second one, which is discontinued. (Hint: if you guessed “all of it” you wouldn’t be wrong. Apparently I who claim to be immune to normal advertising am a total sucker for the Last! Chance! ploy.) And I don’t know what either of them is going to be yet. Except part of my stash. Oh - that reminds me - did you run out and buy stock in Rubbermaid the moment you saw this post? or maybe even its predecessor? If so, I congratulate you on your astuteness and foresight.

I’m not allowed to spin it yet anyway, because there is other work on hand. And that’s fine. I do permit myself, however, to spin up a small test sample of each, just to see what I have to look forward to.

Plenty, I’d say.

 
And now back to yesterday.

On Sundays, you may recall, I generally spend the afternoon at Panera with a group of local Ravelers, who variously knit, crochet, tat, and spin. Well, this past Friday I could feel myself getting greedy about buying Moar Spinning Fiberz, and I thought, let’s be sensible for once, so instead of just ordering a HUGE whack of the legendary BFL (and, er, a few other things) I sent a message to Kelly, asking if by any chance she could bring me a little sample, so I could try it out and get a feel for it. This was a pretty good bet: I hadn’t forgotten the haul she showed us after MDS&W. Sure enough, come yesterday Kelly handed me a well-filled plastic bag and said “Here, try these.”

“These…!”

Boy, I’ll say it’s “these.”

Sorry I didn’t get a better picture of the collection, but I can tell you there’s a whole lot more here than one little sample of BFL! I swear the woman raided her fiber stash and brought me a little of everything she had.

1. Tussah Silk (note that I cut to the chase and started spinning this one before I even thought to take the picture. Can you blame me?)
2. Superwash dyed with marigold
3. Merino/mohair
4. Kid mohair
5. BFL, dyed with logwood and alum
6. Finn top
7. Pencil roving, unknown wool blend
8. Alpaca/merino
9. Wensleydale dyed with marigold
10. Copper Moose Wildberry Colonial
11. Superwash
12. Alpaca
13. Cormo
14. Coopworth dyed with marigold
15. Coopworth dyed with geranium
16. Wool/silk (not visible, for some reason)

That’s not a sample - it’s a SYLLABUS! Or perhaps a dim sum menu.

Kelly has been experimenting lately with natural dyes - all the dye references above are to her own recent work. I brought her something that I knew would fit in with her projects - a little bag of cochineal left over from the days of the Testing Kitchen. Seemed only fair, since I knew she was bringing me BFL and suspected there might be a little more to it than that. But dang, woman! If I’d known you were bringing me a whole CASEful of pretty toys to play with…! Well, let’s just say I only wish I had a whole lot more dead bugs; and if I did, I’d give ‘em all to you.

Mai lessonz (or mai pu-pu platterz) - let me show you them.

I jumped right in at the deep end. Started with the silk, which is slightly insane to draft, especially if you’re sitting in a draft, har har, what with all those superfine fibers flying about… but lovely to spin, shinyshinyshinyshiny.

More fine than even - it’s hard to control. But like anything else you get used to it with practice.

The alpaca felt unexpectedly rough in the drafting -

- and there were a few guard hairs to be picked out here and there. But the spun singles is lovely and soft, and it’s pretty even - for some reason I didn’t have any trouble adjusting to it.

Here’s the BFL:

Everything it’s cracked up to be. This is one very, very, friendly and nice fiber. Took me a while to get a feel for it, as witness a few strands that are overthick or overspun. After the first few lengths, though, you can develop a rhythm for just about anything. I think it was in the course of this stretch that I started to catch a little hang-time - to suspend the spindle, that is, haltingly at first, and then with increasing comfort. If I were prone to this sort of vile humor I’d be tempted to say I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. Oh - wait - I am prone to that sort of humor, aren’t I. So consider it said, and go ahead and groan.

Cormo:

OK, you guys, I get it now, about the Cormo thing. Like buttah. I mean, seriously, if you could spin butter, this is what it would feel like. I’m also reminded of that old line about how to create a great sculpture: you take your chisel and you whap it into your block of marble and you simply chip away anything that doesn’t look like your statue. Yeah, spinning Cormo is like that too. You put the fiber on the spindle and you just gently pull away anything that isn’t your yarn, and it cheerfully spins itself for you until all of it is yarn. Amazing soft happy stuff.

Kid mohair:

A religious experience.

No - an orgasmic one.

Both, actually.

Apparently… I’m going to have some expensive tastes.

Wool/silk:

Dreamy. I could spin this stuff all day.

Superwash:

Ditto. I had to fight it a little at first - the staple is long and smoothed-down by the superwash process, and for a few moments there it seemed like it really wanted to dodge the draft. But we had a little chat about feathering out the ends, and before long we understood each other pretty clearly - and I think it shows in the singles.

Finn top:

This was a little weird to work with - for a while there I wasn’t sure I was going to like it. That may have been partly because of the colors, which at first blush didn’t talk to me (though I must say I’m finding them increasingly appealing in the “after” picture). With rare exceptions I’m not fond of brightly variegated yarns, so it shouldn’t be surprising that with equally rare exceptions I am no fan of the style of fiber painting and spinning/plying that leads to the neon barber-pole effect. I like my colors blended and shaded more subtly, and this was painted to go the other way. Of course that has nothing to do with the nature of the fiber. Which is fascinating. It’s a shorter staple than most of the others, and it’s quite dense - has some of that puffy cotton-candy quality you get with Cormo - but without the buttery-soft self-drafting friendliness of Cormo. It demands a very steady hand - which I sometimes have and sometimes don’t. Good practice.

 
Anyway, here endeth the lesson(z) for today. I am one tired student; but I’m half-way through the course - or the first course, as it were - and I’m not too worried about the final exam. Or the dessert. Bring it on.

… is a lot worse than her bite.

When I e-mailed her (under the subject heading “Please do not kill me”) to give her fair warning that I had been corrupted, she didn’t bat an eye. She calmly replied as follows: “I’ve been expecting this, and I have the solution: you’re going to have to design a sock that starts with hand-dyed roving.”

(Yeah, don’t tempt me. I’m not there yet, but the time may come.)

In public she announces that I’m in big trouble; in private she promises me gifts of roving.

On Ravelry she threatens dire consequences to my seducer; but on the phone? she tells me she is “so happy” for me, and I swear she gets a little choked up as she says it.

Then she tells me that back at MAS&W she saw which way the wind was blowing, and at that point she decided I was a big girl and would just have to fend for myself.

Then she ’splains me all kinds of useful stuff about plying and about different modes of spinning and types of fiber preparation. (”I love to teach,” she unabashedly remarks. Yeah, tell me something I don’t know.)

Then she adds that in any case she blames herself. “It’s obviously my fault for not sending you enough yarn.” (I maintained a discreet silence; I thought it best not to argue the point.)

Today she made up for that - that is, a package of yarn arrived, the first of several - which means today I had to take a small break from my spinning break.

But wait, let’s rewind first to yesterday.

Sure enough, that’s when the new spindle arrived, right on schedule.

I can’t possibly do justice to its beauty. (Notice the recurring theme, though?) It’s another from ButterflyGirl - the whorl is resin and the whole thing is only half an ounce. It’s so light you can hardly even tell it’s turning. Not only is it a fine precision tool; it may well be one of the very prettiest things I’ve ever owned.

And speaking of the prettiest things I’ve ever owned - even less can any picture do justice to the batt that came in the same package:

It’s ButterflyGirl’s “Blue Morpho,” about 70% superwash, 30% bamboo. I fell in love with it when I was ordering the spindle, and as I watched it accidentally tumble into my shopping cart I told myself, “Self, you are SO not ready yet to spin this as it should be spun, but you will be happier knowing it is waiting in your stash for when you are.”

Uh-huh. What a difference a day makes. By the time it arrived… the ol’ Self was already quite a bit cockier than that. At any rate I pulled out a small sample and did a test, on the beautiful new spindle of course.

I’m still not leaping into spinning it - not until I know what it wants to be. But I don’t think it will be waiting long.

Meanwhile on the original tried-and-true spindle, I continued plugging away at the purple stuff -

- and I spent a pleasant evening (much of a night, actually - it got pretty hypnotic) preparing the previously mentioned red/orange mohair:

Not pre-drafting it, as such, I hasten to add (I’ve gotten involved in quite the discussion on Ravelry about the pros and cons of this practice, and am happy to find that the really experienced spinners of my acquaintance eschew it for the most part), but fluffing out the locks and removing VM. (Mind you, it wasn’t advertised as being prepped for spinning, nor did I buy it for that purpose, so no blame to the source.)

MUCH easier to work with now.

Especially on the pretty new spindle.

That’s all the spinning news for now, except for the plying (also on the new spindle! with its 2.25″ whorl!) and finishing of the other skein of TsarinaTspun from the original batch of fiber:

Obligatory penny shot:

I did something a little crazy here - or maybe something ordinary, I don’t really know yet. Being in haste to free up my (only!) spindle the other night, I skeined the singles straight onto my swift, tied it off securely in several places, and then took it off the swift and let it kink itself all to hell and back. The fiber is springy enough that when I came to wind it for plying it was tricky but not at all impossible to get it back onto the swift, and of course because it hadn’t been under tension for the intervening couple of days the twist was still quite active. So it pretty much plied itself; I barely had to guide it onto the spindle and give it a semi-occasional nudge in the right direction. Result: unlike the first tskein it is not at all overplied.

I can see where this approach could be a recipe for disaster with a more delicate singles, but in this instance it was damn cool to go way out on a limb and not feel it break under me.

I am learning learning learning learning!

Then came today’s mail, and spinning went back on the shelf.

Here’s what we got.

A test skein of the latest version (new dye process) of the base yarn for the Tsweater. It comprises the same elements as the earlier version but it’s a much more solid-seeming colorway than the last one. Jen says there’ll still be plenty of subtle variation in the shade, though it isn’t as noticeable in the skein, so I still need to swatch twisty stuff with it and look at it in different lights before I confess my undying love for it. But really, what’s not to love?

The rest of this all has to do with the Frozen Margarita, Tsock #3 for this season’s club.

This is the yarn we’re NOT using:

It’s a very lovely sea-cell blend, and I am sure something very lovely is going to happen to it eventually - but it isn’t right for this sock, which I want to be crisp rather than squishy, summery and silly rather than soft and serious. The sea-cell is 3-ply and it’s a beautiful texture - just not the right texture.

This, on the other hand -

- is exactly what I wanted all along. DINGDINGDINGDINGDING! We have a winner.

This is Crystal Palace’s Panda Cotton, just the thing for a cool light-hearted summer knit. (Yes, I hear you out there in the peanut gallery, groaning “Splitty splitty splitty.” I reply, “A great opportunity to fine-tune basic technique.” So there.)

We also have winners for needle and gauge:

That’s one of the stitch patterns for the sock, a lime wedge, freshly-swatched on US #2 needles, at about 6.5 SPI. I still want to tinker with eyelet placement on this, but you get the idea. (What’s that you say? It reminds you of Grand Shell? Good call - as so often happens with me it’s heavily modified to suit my purpose, but the fundamental structure is much the same.)

So, next up - still more swatching.

And then, while I wait for the next batch of yarn… a little more playing with the red mohair.

Because I’m no longer afraid Jennifer will take out a contract on me. Whatever else happens I’m pretty sure now that I’ll wake up tomorrow to find myself still alive and knitting… and spinning, too.

What have we here?

Why, I do believe it’s - yes - yes, it is - the very first tskein ever of TsarinaTspun.

It’s made from that first batch of singles (yeah, I know - tsingles, right?) - 2-ply, about 31 yards, about 14-15 WPI on average, give or take.

Spindle-plying isn’t quite as much fun as spinning, it turns out. Nevertheless, it makes YARN, so of course it’s worth it. I am not, however, going to invest time and effort into plying the rest of the singles from that fiber - not yet. Not until the, um, second spindle (ahem) arrives in the mail, because the current one is otherwise occupied and I don’t want to pre-empt it.

(I think the new spindle is coming tomorrow. It is from the same source as the first and is also heartrendingly pretty. More to the point it has a 2.25″ wide whorl and only weighs .5 oz, which features I suspect are gonna be right up my alley.)

Those of you who were shocked at my toying with cotton balls (BTW The Boy^TM reminds me that this was HIS suggestion, but he refuses to tell me whether or not he was kidding) will be relieved to know that I am well-supplied now with more appropriate fiber. (Incidentally, some of you evidently didn’t remember that I have unfortunate associations with dryer lint - though I won’t deny that just before the cotton ball episode I did cast a brief glance in that direction before deciding that I wasn’t quite THAT desperate.)

So… here’s what I’m spinning now. These first two are from the local place I mentioned - not a big selection, but enough to tide me over until other things (ahem) arrive in the mail.

It’s wool. I don’t know what kind of wool. Just… wool. Long fibers. Pretty smooth. Easy to spin. Uncomplicated. Good practice.

Hey, remember The Contraption? Turns out it’s going to come in pretty handy for winding off singles, at least for a while… until something else (ahem) arrives in the mail.

I suspect I’m still tending to overspin some, but of course I won’t know for sure until I ply this and build up more overall experience.

Speaking of plying it…

… here’s what it looks like in a little kink test. It’s not an earth-shattering color, but it has a slight silvery shine to it that pleases me. (More noticeable in the previous picture, but in real life you see it more when it’s pseudo-plied. Still working on finding the right setup for these macro shots.)

How much of this do I have? Dunno yet. I’ve spun maybe 1/3 of the two balls I bought, and I haven’t bothered weighing them, so… dunno. And dunno how much I’m going to have, and dunno what I propose to do with it. Don’t care. For right now… it’s all about the spinning and the learning. Concrete considerations can wait.

Wound off that bobbin last night when the spindle was at capacity (yeah, I could have squozen More On, but the weight was throwing off the balance and making me feel clumsy), and then shifted gears into this:

Again… wool. At least this one has a label, but not a highly informative one. It’s 60% New Zealand, 40% domestic, but I couldn’t tell you what kind of animal it came from. I mean - sheep, presumably, but no idea what flavor of sheep.

It feels a little coarser than the grey, and the fibers are longer…

… so it isn’t difficult to spin it pretty fine.

If you like your laceweight a little on the rough side - I’m gonna have a few ounces of it kicking around pretty soon.

I know the conventional wisdom says that in learning to spin ever finer and smoother it is also important not to lose the ability to spin thicker singles. But in real life… this is me we’re talking about, Miss Fine Gauge USA. When was the last time I actually wanted to knit anything heavier than a sport weight? I tell myself I will also learn to spin thick stuff on principle, because I should. But that isn’t where my heart and my needles lie, and in the final analysis I’m spinning to please an audience of one, so I think we know what’s going to happen to that particular skill once I acquire it. Can you say “atrophy”?

So I’m going for it on the fine-and-smooth front, and I’m getting greedy and ambitious.

Back in May, at MAS&W, I picked up some small bags of severely beautimous dyed mohair locks from the legendary Buckwheat Bridge.

I know you won’t believe me, but I swear on a stack of alpaca/silk or anything else you hold sacred that I had NO intention whatsoever of spinning these - I had a different and very specific application in mind. (Sort of a reverse thrum thing, which we’ll maybe talk about some other time.)

Now, however, there’s no denying that I’m looking at them from a different angle.

The other night when I finished the first fiber I cast a cautious glance in the direction of these bags.

Every single one of the colors - there’s about an ounce of each - makes my heart go pit-a-pat. The fiber is soft and shiny, treacherously smooth and short…

… and I was dying to play with it but also terrified of blowing it.

I pulled out a tiny bit and gave it a few twists. The first attempt was so fall-apart-y that it didn’t even survive to be photographed.

The second was better - at least it held together and kinda looked like something when I let it kink -

- but it confirmed that I was not ready to handle the fiber in a manner that would do justice to it in my own view. That is, I could spin it, but I knew that I wouldn’t be happy with the result. So I put away the bags, and that’s when I glanced at the dryer lint and wound up playing silly buggers with the cotton balls.

You can laugh all you want at those dumb cotton balls - I think they’re pretty funny myself - but seriously, seriously, I LEARNED from those cotton balls. And last night, after a day of practice on the grey and purple fibers (I spent a couple of hours waiting around a doctor’s office, so there was plenty of time to draw it out, as it were), I did another, less cautious, test with a bit of one of the red locks. Here’s my sample:

Yeah. I can do this.

How can I NOT?

 
And no, of course I haven’t really forgotten about tsocks. Don’t be tsilly.

But I’ve earned my little spinning break, honest. I’ve done all my swatching for #4 and #3, and I’ve actually very nearly finished #6 (not cart before the horse, but because for complicated and boring reasons I happen to have most of the yarn for it already in my stash). Except for the last of those they are not going to be tstealth tsocks. I’ll show you progress as it happens, but even I can’t do much more on #3 until I have the yarn. Which is coming soon, and if you doubt that (or even if you don’t) go check out the sneak preview of the Frozen Margarita colorway over on Jennifer’s blog today. If the real thing looks half as bright and pretty as the sample appears on my monitor, we’re going to have a juicy little bit of summer knit action going on in this space pretty soon.

You win.

All you Scheming Sirens of Spinning, go ahead and laugh. Go ahead.

Jennifer, please try not to kill me.

Remember how the other day I said I had put the spindle and fiber into DEEP storage?

Yeah. Apparently it wasn’t DEEP enough. The next day I pulled it out again. And I messed around a little, and at first “messed” was the operative word. And then suddenly I actually saw/felt/understood the twist traveling up into the drafted fiber. And then… I was toast.

I’m still toast, dammit.

I was going to sit on this for a while, keep it to myself, let the humiliation marinate, but apparently I can’t even do that. “Love and a cough cannot be hid.”

Now let me repeat what nobody is going to listen to anyway: there’s no point in you telling me you told me so, because I already knew. It isn’t news. I wasn’t avoiding spinning because I didn’t want to - I was avoiding it because I DID want to. I was trying to Do The Right Thing. I have now failed, and on your heads be it.

Yes, yours, and you know who you are. I blame YOU. J’accuse. I blame Cassie. I blame Juno. I blame Cate. And I blame Kelly and Liz and Wendy and Glenna and Marcy and yes, even Jennifer herself. And a little dishonorable mention has to go to Gryphon and Rabbitch - just a little. Even ButterflyGirl is not exempt from her share. But most of all I blame MistressWenzer, because after all she is the one who pushed me over the edge by sheer brute force. (Jen… feel free to put some coal in her next TsockFlock Club package, OK? She iz Teh Evil.)

The only one I don’t blame? Me. This is so not my fault!

Some are born spinners, some achieve spinning, and some have spinning thrust upon them. That would be me, and the only surprise there is… the first of those. Apparently I have a natural feel for it. I thought I’d be spinning big knotty-looking wobbly caterpillar things for at least the first few months. Apparently not. Not even the first few hours, really.

Oh, not that it isn’t thick & thin - not that it comes anywhere close to the smooth fine stuff of my perfectionist dreams. But for a total park-&-draft rookie… it’s way better than I dared to expect. (Leader? We don’t need no steenkin’ leader.)

Exhibit A - Baby’s first singles:

About 75 yards here. Wildly uneven, but not as wildly so as I thought it would be.

Incidentally, I apparently need to get used to a whole new mode of weight measurement. It turns out, at least in this case, that when a bag is labeled “two ounces” and you’ve spun one ounce, you still have WAY more than half the fiber left. I stopped and wound off after one, thinking I’d ply the second batch with the first, but that plan ain’t gonna work out so great, because not only is there a very great difference in the thickness and consistency of the singles, there is a considerable difference in yardage - and no, not just because of the difference in thickness. Based on a subsequent weighing, it seems that in this case “two” translates to a very generous “almost three.”

Moving on to…

Exhibit B - Baby’s second singles:

About 132 yards here. Still a bit slubby blah blah blah, but vastly smoother and finer.

(Yeah, now I need to practice the penny-macro-shot thing. And find a different background for this color.)

Kept going with this until the spindle was seriously overloaded. Wound off, then spun up the last scrap of fiber.

Exhibit C - Baby’s third singles:

Only about 13.5 yards, but the progression continues. We’re getting there. (I think I will end up contriving a way to ply like with like… but we’ll see.)

And as of about 2:00 AM, that’s the end of the bag of fiber.

Look, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea about how obsessed I’m preparing to be here, but… well, um… hey, have you ever idly wondered how much yardage you can get out of a cosmetic-grade cotton ball? Guess what. I can tell you.

That’s two cotton balls. It made about 7+ yards of a fairly fine single.

About 3+ yards of nice useless 2-ply.

It has teeny-tiny short fine stubborn fibers, so it’s a real pain in the ass to draft and the spinning is damn delicate… but it can be done, and it’s pretty good practice for the ol’ fine motor skills. If I can get a smooth single out of this, I can spin anything.

Hey, what are you lookin’ at me like that for? it’s a good academic exercise. And… in the middle of the night, you couldn’t beat it for utility of location.

No, I’m not going to tell you what I’ve ordered on-line. Not yet. This is going to take some getting used to. But I will admit that I find myself thinking back with longing nostalgia to all those bags of dog hair I finally decided to throw away. Luke’s winter undercoat is soft and fine and long and just grabby enough; it would make fabulous spinning fiber.

Meanwhile - I’m off to the one local place I know of that sells roving. Just a small fix, that’s all I need to tide me over. Just an ounce or two of something simple and delicious.

Urgent? Nah, of course it’s not urgent. I don’t need this. And I can stop any time, you know.

I just wouldn’t want to run out of cotton balls.

Socks? What socks?