The last entry I had started spinning 2 colors of Corriedale blends. The blue aqua is 55/45 Corriedale and fawn Suri alpaca and the grey is 50/50 Corriedale and grey Suri alpaca. I also had that skein of silk dyed by Dicentra. My original plan of spinning all singles and then plying 1/4 each grey/blue, grey/grey, blue/blue, and a blue/grey/silk sort of happened.
I ended up with 10.5 oz of 1086 yards in 6 skeins. Starting from the left: 2 ply aqua, 2 ply aqua/silk, 2 ply aqua/grey, 3 ply aqua/grey/silk, 2 ply grey/silk, and finally 2 ply grey. No sure what it will turn into yet, but it is quite lovely! Maybe a large lacy shawl. But then again, a rosepath twill woven shawl might be just the thing! Make this the warp and black silk or Tencel for the weft.
The next spin I’ve been working on is Australian grey Merino. This was a lovely grease fleece that I ordered along with some other fibers, in particular, lapp silk which is another story. I scoured the fleece and carded it with my Pat Green drum carder. I left a bit of the grease in so the spinning was easy and the fibers didn’t slip away from me. It is a dark variable grey at about 40wpi. I only have about 8 oz of this lovely fleece. So I am also spinning 50/50 yak/silk at the same weight to ply with the Merino. I found that cross lacing on the flier eased the draw in so I can spin even finer without working too hard on it. So far, I have 2 bobbins of the Merino and about 1/4 of the yak/merino. Off to spin the rest of the bobbin so I can ply the Merino with the yak/silk and see how I like it. But, what is not to like!
Ginger writes: Why do you spin? Why in this day and age of readily available, immediate gratification yarn stores and online shops would you want to spin individual strands of fibers into yarn?
Me? Why do I spin? There are reasons I can delineate and many others I simply cannot.
I spin to produce the specific yarn I want for a specific project. Sometimes I find a pattern that I particularly like and plan out the yarn I will use. I select the fleece, wash, dye, card, and then spin to the weight I want. I like to select the different fibers, blend them, and plan out the yarn in advance. Or I select the roving I like that is the appropriate fiber content for the project, sometimes already dyed, sometimes not. I figure how much I am going to need and while I am spinning the yarn I review the pattern to decide how much modification it needs. More often I write my own pattern. You cannot get this kind of start-to-finish satisfaction in store bought yarns. But this is not the primary reason I spin yarn.
Ginger and Bunny
I spin because I am very tactile. I love the feel of the fibers, especially very soft fleeces still warm from the sheep or alpaca they were just sheared off of. I love the sensation of warmth or coolness the fibers exhibit. I love the sweet hay smell and feel of lanolin from a clean, fresh sheep fleece. I am amazed as I watch the twist capture fragile individual fibers and make them into a strong, stable yarn. Fiber is a feast for all the senses, except perhaps taste!
I spin to connect with a distant past that is very hard to define. When I spin, I feel a connecting thread that stretches back through time and space to the first woman who figured it out. I feel as if I can close my eyes, open them, and be in some other time and place and I would not be surprised at all! As the fibers flow through my fingers, I experience an internal calm that is unique to this particular activity. Spinning feels as natural to me as walking. I am sometimes amazed that I have not done it my whole life, only the last 30 years! Spinning is my Zen. It quiets and calms my mind. The day’s tension drains away as I spin.
Many years ago I had Lyme Disease. During the course of the illness I became severely neurologically impaired. I could not walk without help, brush my hair, feed myself or do any of the many things we take for granted. I lost my long-term and photographic memory as well as my short-term memory and I was aphasic, the wrong words came out of my mouth. I could not remember how a sentence started so I could not carry on a conversation for many months. On the other hand, I could think and reason, I just could not say the correct words! I spent a year relearning basic skills and speech.
One of the first physical things I could do once I could get around on my own was spin. I still couldn’t carry on a conversation, could barely brush my hair or feed myself, but I could spin. How glorious that was! It was a huge part of my recovery. As I look back on it now, I realize that I had close to my 10,000 hours of ‘practice’ in spinning before I became ill. According to Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success, you need to spend 10,000 hours of doing something before you can truly become an expert and really excel in that field. I don’t know that I excelled at spinning, in fact I feel like a merely competent spinner most of the time, but the physical and mental memory was present even if the rest of my brain had not caught up yet! So for a year I spun for the simple joy of spinning.
I spin to connect to the most basic part of my being, to be sure the that the connecting thread stretching back to my very origins is still intact. I allow the tactile part of spinning to take over and carry me through the most difficult parts of my life. It helps to keep me on an even keel. It is my lifeline.
