Progression of a new obsession

I've been absent from the blog for a week or two due to a new obsession.  You may recall the purchase in July of a drop spindle.  Welllll, the results of my first efforts were not fabulous, but on the other hand, why would they be... spinning takes a lot of practice to perfect and I guess you need to build up muscle memory.  But  I wasn't toooo disappointed and as you can see I made a rather rustic little coffee cup mat with some of it, so it is, technically, knitting yarn cos I did knit with it.  So my first ever handspun is photographed right there, with my lovely new camera.  The fibre was the fabulously named Jacob Humbug and its possible that I blogged about this at the time.  Anyway, I loved the spinning right from the start, but stuff happened, and I had to put it down for a bit.  But I loved it enough to want to continue and I got a reasonably large amount of not very expensive fibre to practice with since, as you can see from the humbug... I certainly needed practice.

And a few weeks later I picked out a bag of mixed shades of blue merino and I spun a bit up.  And so that's my second attempt right there, and you can see that it was quite thick and there wasn't much of it, and it wasn't really looking like yarn you'd want to knit... but it was thinner and closer to knitting yarn than the first attempt.  But it still wasn't quite right.  The ball at the back is the singles I had left from the darker part, as I managed to spin more of the dark than the light. I didn't weigh it, just broke some off the longer pieces of fibre so that's hardly a surprise.  The ball at the front is two singles very inexpertly plied. 

I went to Yarndale a week or so ago and there I bothered just about every spinner I saw with my questions and my admiration for their craft, and spinners, like sewers, are generous with their knowledge and home I came armed with ideas for how to improve my spinning  (and a burning desire to buy a nicer spindle... but that's a topic for another day).  And one spinner I met, and I really wish I could remember her name, said something to me that really stuck and I really appreciated.  "If you like it, and you want to knit with it, then you did it right... if you don't like it, then don't do it that way again, try a different approach."  Somehow I embrace that in sewing but it never occurred to me that it could apply here.  But I came home and I joined a couple of Spinning groups on Ravelry, and read some of the beginners threads from end to end, and watched You Tube videos of spinning and plying until the early hours of the morning, and identified a couple of pretty major things I seemed to be doing incorrectly, and I set off again using a bit more of my  mixed blue fibres. And here you can see my spindle with lots of lovely yarn on it, sat on the rest of the lovely fluff, with one of my balls of singles that I'd already spun up.  That little lot represents a week of spinning like every night until rather later than I should have been.  And last night I took my three balls of singles, and I wound a plying ball, having discovered that I should have plied before I washed, which is possibly why attempt number two didn't ply properly, cos I washed and stretched the singles before plying.  And I took that plying ball and I plied, and I plied and I plied.   And it felt as though I had spun miles and miles and miles of yarn.  And I wound it off onto the niddy noddy, and counted the wraps... and did the math... and I had 122 metres of yarn.  Approximately.  Which is enough to knit some sort of small accessory I guess.  But not exactly miles and miles of yarn. 

 And this morning, I washed it, and hung it to dry.  This is it before I washed it, but its not changed much with washing.  Its in the airing cupboard drying as I write and readers, I absolutely love my yarn.  Its not perfect, its not even, its everything from sock weight to bulky depending on where you look at it.  Its not fabulously spun, or plied, but is it not a very, very pretty yarn.  Here it is in close up.  There is about 115 grammes there.  I plan to spin up the other half of the bag of merino over the coming weeks and then decide what I'm going to do with the whole amount.  I split the bag of fibre into two very roughly.  This half is the green  blues and turquoises as you can see, the other half is red and purple shaded blues.  If they look enough different when they are finished, I might be able to make a stripy item with them both, and thus get something larger from the whole bag.... 

 But first... I think I'd better finish the projects I put down in favour of my spindle, don't you?