A blue skein

It took me five days to spin this, ply it, wash it and dry it and I'm rather pleased with it.

A couple of months ago, someone posted about 'lap waste' on the UK Spinners group on Ravelry so I went to the World of Wool website to have a look and bought some.  Lap Waste is basically leftovers from making up full-size skeins of fibre that WoW sell and comes in bags of several sizes.  I bought a bag of 500g and think I paid £9 for it.  When it arrived, I was quite pleased as most of the bits of fibre were of a decent-enough size to at least practise spinning.

I'd separated it into the bits and as you can see, had put some of it into bags at that point.

Also in the bag were these two fibres:

The blue/purple bit on the right is, I think a blend of merino and silk and I split that in two and spun it into two singles.  Then I spun the purple into a single.  The intention was to ply the three singles together, but when I put the three strands together, I decided that the purple was too dark.  So, I took the light blue from the bag, spun that and then plyed that with the blue/purple strands.  The result is the skein of yarn in the top photo.  80g in weight, 183m of lenght, DK weight.  I think it's going to be a hat - probably Porom.

I've now taken the red, orange and yellow fibrey bits from the bag and am carding them to blend the colours into rolags.  I've never spun from rolags and I'm finding it quite difficult.  The resulting yarn may well turn out to be at best, 'arty', but it's all good practice.  Mind you, I did learn something important about carding yesterday.  Keep an eye on what you're doing otherwise your hand might slip and the teeth on the carders are sharp.  This is how I know:

It doesn't feel as sore as it looks, unless I knock it.

Hope you all have a nice weekend, despite the weather, which doesn't seem able to make up its mind today.  I'm hoping to make it our quarterly knitting/crafting get-together at Frating (a village just outside Colchester) tomorrow, but as DD2 came home from school with a sore throat yesterday, I might not manage it.  By the time I go to knitting group on Monday, it will have been four weeks since I last saw any of my knitting friends and I do miss getting together to chatter and gossip. 

Bye :)