Jananas

This winter I have a bunch of to do’s on my list of things to learn – spinning, dying yarn, magic loop, latch/rug hooking, etc. Today I met up with Caitlin for lunch and we wandered through Kensington Market once we were done, of course stopping by Lettuce Knit on our way. I was looking to pick up some circular needles long enough & small enough to learn magic loop to knit socks on planes. I did pick some up. I also picked up a drop spindle and some rovings to test it out on.

I got home this afternoon and decided that I’d give it a go. Instead of using the new rovings I picked up, I started with some of the leftover rovings from the first pair of thrummed mittens I made. I watched a bunch of Megan LaCore‘s youtube videos to get the gist of drafting, spinning, and forming a skein. I then gave it a go!

First up was drafting the rovings. The big pile in the back were the ones that ended up in nice long pieces. The pile on the front left are ones that broke and so were shorter. The pile on the front right was just too small to work with and so will get used for more thrummed goodness in the future. The big thing I noticed was that the dye job seemed the impact how easily the pieces came apart/drafted, with the heavily dyed areas being ‘tough’ and the areas with little dye coming apart very, very easily (hence some of the breaks).

I had some trouble getting the drop spindle to spin, mainly because the yarn kept coming out of the little hook up top. My guess is this’ll be rectified with lots more practice and a little patience. This is a picture of my ‘yarn’ on the spindle.

I also found that I had trouble changing over from one piece of roving to the next. Again, something that should get better with practice. I stopped spinning when I was running out of space on the spindle (and time to spin). I wrapped it around the back of a chair in my dining room. I didn’t measure it out, but it was maybe 8-10 wraps of the back of the chair… So, really not very much at all!

And there’s my first (very, very) little skein of handspun yarn! I feel sort of accomplished in that I decided to give it a go and was able to produce something. However, I feel like this would have been way, way easy if I’d had someone to help teach me as I’m sure that there are lots of handy tips and tricks to help solve what I experienced. I guess I’ll add finding spinners in the Toronto area to my list of things to do in the new year.