Spinning Round-Up: May

Late again!  No excuses; I just haven't got round to writing this entry.

I haven't got any spinning FOs to show for May.  I was going to say I've just been plodding on with my spinning, but that's not right because 'plodding' suggests it's a chore when the truth is, I've been enjoying what I've been doing.

The bright pink fluff is coming along and I finished the first single.  When I first started using my spindle, I hand-wound the yarn off onto the inside of a toilet roll, but that took absolutely ages to do, so now, I tape some thinnish card around the core of my yarn-winder and carefully wind off from the spindle, which takes about a third of the time.  Here's the first single:

The colours in this range from a very pale, almost-white pink through to that eye-searing bright pink on the outside of the cake.  I finished the second ply yesterday evening and have started on the third, so hopefully I'll have a finished yarn to show off at the beginning of July.

I've barely done any spinning on my Turkish spindle, so no photos of that.  I think I've spun a couple more rolags and I can see that the rolags I'm making are getting better with practice.

On my wheel, I've had progress on my sweater spin (yay!!).  I filled each of my six bobbins with 70g of spun fibre, which meant that I couldn't do any more until I'd plyed two of the bobbins together to make the final yarn:

Bobbins in a shoebox

First plyed skein of yarn!

Because each skein of yarn I'm making weighs 130-140g, I'm using my jumbo flyer and bobbin to ply the two strands of yarn into the final yarn and that means my legs are getting a good work-out.  In fact, I overdid it with that first skein as I plyed it all in one day, which was a bit silly because I've still got foot problems (plantar fasciitis in my right heel/sole).  That first skein weighs 129g and is 378m in length, pre-washing, so I think I'm going to need five skeins in total.  It'll be interesting to see how the yarn blooms once it's washed.  I've made four more 35g batts on my drum carder and have just started spinning those up.

I've also started a long-term project on my other top-whorl spindle (I bought two the same, thinking that DD2 might be interested in learning to spindle spin, but she wasn't).  I bought a 500g bag of mixed 'waste' fibre from World of Wool, so I've sorted it out into bundles of 30-35g according to colour and am going to spin each bundle into a single and will then make multi-coloured yarn by plying three singles together.  This is an 'upstairs' project, so I don't work on it as much as I do my 'downstairs' things (a few minutes while I'm waiting for the bath to fill, first thing in the morning while I'm waiting for the teasmade to do its thing, if I wake up in the night and don't want to read, etc).  The first bundle is purple:

Finally, not a WIP, but a new purchase.  I'd seen large spindles for plying on a couple of blogs, especially this one from Snyder Spindles (scroll down to see the photo), but the cost of post and packaging from the US, plus the probability of having to pay duty and post office handling fees meant I couldn't really justify ordering one, so I had another search on the internet and came across a UK company called Kerry Spindles, who makes a large-sized (68g or so) top-whorl spindle for plying.  I was going to put in a link, but I don't really need to because I've taken a photo instead:

Yes, I bought one!  I also took a photo of it next to one of my top-whorl spindles so you can see the difference in the sizes:

The new spindle (which is naturally purple - the wood is Purpleheart) is just under 4" in diameter and the lighter spindle is just under 2.5" in diameter.

In other spinning news, I've joined a team for the Tour de Fleece which starts on 1 July.  The team I'm spinning with is the Wool 'n Spinning one, from a blog/vlog and corresponding Ravelry group that I follow.  I've never done the Tour de Fleece before (link to the Ravelry group if you want to see what it's all about), so it should be fun.

So, that's my spinning summary for May.

I've got some knitting and crochet catching up blogging to do as well, which I'm hoping to do tomorrow.