Weekend Spinning

Over the weekend I was supposed to garden...

Plant, garden, garden, plant. Instead, I played outside without doing any work - and spun a little bit. (Co-workers did come to take some well-propagating zebra grass on Saturday. That counts a little, right?)

So, here's some Crown Mountain Farm BFL roving that you've seen before in Stonehenge.

The singles were spun up - 4 oz. per bobbin last week.

After plying, I washed the skein and placed it in the shower for drying. (Yes, I had to move it to shower last night.)

The 8 oz. spun up into about 475 yards of light fingering weight yarn. What do you think about knitting Laminaria with it?

I had a small amount that didn't fit on the large skein. It dried pretty quickly, and I was able to take an accurate color shot:

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The Twisted Fiber Art shop opened up two weeks ago, and I purchased a wee bit of roving from them. One was a skein of Guardian-colorway- in 'lively' - superwash merino. (Cathy gets the enabler badge for starting my wee addiction to this fiber line.) My hank of Guardian had dark purple instead of black - which I loved.I used the fractal 2-ply method for spinning the braid. This creates long striping barberpole yarn. Here's a quick how-to I learned on Ravelry:

1. Split the roving in half. 2. Split one half lengthwise in multiple strips. (here, I had 10.) 3. Spin the first half with looong color repeats. 4. Spin the second half -the short repeats- on a separate bobbin. 5. Ply together.

You can get a sense of how the yarn stripes when it's on the bobbin.Off the bobbin and on the stretcher (niddy noddy, although I like to type 'knitty noddy'), it just looks like barberpoling handspun. Ze stripes have disappeared!
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When I spin, the wheel is right next to a window and the couch. Both dogs like to either wistfully look outside, or seemingly glare at me for spending time with fiber instead of them. Here's a little proof with Paco pics: