As I mentioned in my last post, I recently went to Fiber Weekend up at my Mother-in-Law’s house. I don’t know where she came up with the idea, but this was apparently the second annual iteration of it, and I gotta say…
…it was awesome.
I’ve been craving some spinning time for months, since last year’s Stitch & Pitch, actually. I apparently didn’t reveal this at the time, but when I was at the game I may have walked away from the Serial Knitters booth with this:
It’s been burning a hole in my stash since I got it, but I’ve been a good little knitter and worked on the Wedding Blankets rather than indulging. But, Fiber Weekend! What better time to indulge, really? If you can’t play with fiber during Fiber Weekend, something is very, very wrong with the world indeed.
Of course, it’s been so long since I spun that I didn’t even think to check if I had all the parts to my wheel before I trucked the whole box I keep it in up to Canada, only to discover…
…that the screw to hold on the flyer was not there. In fact, as soon as I started to put it together I thought to myself, “Wait a minute, there was something about this that I was supposed to remember next time I spun, something about being in the Office…on my desk…oh crap.”
But I was not going to be deterred by so simple a piece of hardware. After scouring my Mother-in-Law’s garage for the right screw (she didn’t have it, of course), I decided to embrace Fiber Weekend a little more completely and solved the problem in the most appropriate manner possible…
…with fiber. I used some kitchen twine to weave through the two pieces and then around them both a bunch of times, tying at each crossing for stability. It took a few tries, but once I had it up it lasted all weekend, which is saying something because I spun a lot that weekend.
I split the 4 oz of fiber into three roughly equal sections along the length, then split each into smaller, mostly random sections and started each bobbin at a different point in the color repeat. The goal was to have a fully marled yarn with lots of color shifts, similar to Trekking XXL.
The plies were gorgeous, the colors perfectly suited for each other. I had the first bobbin filled by the end of the first night (I might have stayed up late to make that happen, but it was totally worth it).
The second day saw the completion of the second bobbin, which I also might have stayed up late for, but which was also totally, completely worth it.
The third bobbin took a bit more time, so it wasn’t until I was back home on my own couch that I managed to get to the plying stage – but I was so excited to see what the yarn would actually look like that the bobbins didn’t stay like that for long, and soon:
They were totally empty. The best part was that there was almost zero waste – two bobbins were done within a foot of each other, and the third only had enough to create a few yards of two ply yarn:
And the actual yarn? It’s some amazing amount of marled three-ply goodness.
I haven’t wound it off to set it and figure out how many yards I have yet, but I’m already dreaming of what this is going to end up being. I’m thinking maybe a scarf, some pattern that would use up every last drop of this gorgeousness I have created. Any ideas?
Also, in related news, I apparently seem to have slipped on the whole keeping-yarn-away-from-Monkey-Kitty thing. I looked away from the leftover mini-bobbin of yarn on the table for about 2 minutes, and next thing I know…
…Monkey Kitty has dragged it into the corner and is pretending to be ready to defend his kill. Luckily, he’s actually a complete pansy, so he ran when I went after him and left the yarn behind for me to return to its high shelf safely out of reach.
