Summer of Spinning

All four ounces of this fiber have been spun into singles and are resting quietly on various spindles waiting to be plied. I like to give the new singles at least a week to recuperate before taking them into the next stage. Makes them less likely to get cranky and snarly.

In the meantime I extracted this eight-ounce bundle of hand-dyed superwash merino from the plastic bin under the bed where it has lived since last summer. I'm really glad I bought it, because the Crown Mountain Farms website no longer shows availability for this colorway, which is called "Say A Little Prayer," something I often do while spinning.

Not only is the fiber beautiful, but it's incredibly easy to draft. Suddenly I feel like a pro, zooming along as the singles shift from green to cream. I thought briefly of attempting to do something ambitious with the colors – spin all the cream, then all the green, and then ply them together perhaps – but in the end I decided to spin it random. I'm not confident enough of my spinning skills to be sure the colors would go where they were intended to go. Maybe next time.

And there are, after all, eight full ounces. That's twice what I have ever done before. The fiber attached to this spindle (Cascade St. Helens, and yes, it is new) plus the three little bird nests represents only the first ounce. I'll spin this ounce, spin the second ounce on another spindle, ply them together, and do the same thing three more times. I believe that will keep me nicely occupied for the rest of the summer -- for spinning. Knitting, of course, gets its own separate allocation of hobby time.