Baby, I've missed you...

Over the last few years, I have been steadily falling in love with spinning. I started with a drop spindle, almost two years ago I bought an antique wheel (my baby!) from a friend. One of the challenges of not being able to take it overseas with me has been that every time I start getting comfortable with my wheel I had to go back to Africa. Spinning a whole roving using the ‘ply on the fly’ method was great practice though, and as I’ve been spinning this year I’ve noticed some real progress on creating a consistent single.

First, I started with 59 grams of beautiful light fawn/cream alpaca from Round House Alpaca Farm. I was able to fit it all on my bobbin easily, and once I got going and found a rhythm was pretty happy with the singles.

I then plied it up on my drop spindle which it barely fit on, but was rewarded with around 107 yards of nice soft yarn. Last summer I’m pretty sure I put too much twist into the green fiber I spun. I’m starting to feel the urge to knit a gradient effect hat as I have three colors of alpaca fiber to play with!

The next thing I started spinning was a pinky-purple roving from Maiden Yarn. It took a little bit to fall into the right rhythm for this fiber, but I got there! This isn't the best representation of how pretty the colors are, but hopefully once it's plied I'll get a better picture.

The roving was divided into thirds, so I’m going to take a break now that I’ve got the first third spun do another color of alpaca--rose gray! I have a little less of this one, only about 51 grams, but it should be plenty for a gradient hat or two! Now to start saving for another wheel…