Dangerous, Expensive Bugs Have Bitten Me!

The gardening bug and the spinning bug, to be specific.

This will take you to a one-pot herb garden from Apartment Therapy. Or, if you tend to forget to water the pots, how about this? After the Great Fridge Cleanup of weekend before last, I am almost in the mood to cook. Almost. Dinner last night, while I took a break from spinning, was mac and cheese from a box, preceded by salmon-flavored shoe leather. Yes, I nuked the fillet just *that* much too long. It tasted OK, but fish was never meant to be al dente.

Here is a twice-spun bobbin. I filled it late yesterday afternoon and realized that the lovely, soft yarns that I spun back in the 1980’s were too soft and too loosely spun to survive as socks. So I put it on the lazy-kate and added more twist, using the smallest whorl on the flyer.



Back in the day, my preferred method for plying was to wind off a bobbin using my ball winder, then grab both ends and ply the yarn upon itself. That gave me a tiny loop at one end of my skein, and when I was knitting, I would feed the raw end of the next skein into that loop and only have to knit in one end.

Here is this batch, wound into a cake prior to plying.



And here is the plied yarn. Not bad for a few hours’ work. 54.9g of mixed fibers, predominantly wool, and just enough Hair of the Mo to make it wily and cantankerous. Definitely not the prettiest or best-balanced yarn I have ever made, but then it’s been 17 years since the last skein.



I don’t have a skein-winder or a niddy noddy, so I used the back of two chairs to skein it for washing. I have no idea which of all these boxes holds my McMorran Yarn Balance, but this looks to be somewhere between fingering weight and sport weight.

I think I would like the texture better if I had not put in the additional twist. It still wouldn’t have been suitable for socks, but it also wouldn’t have been a good substitute for baling twine. I think it will soften up now that I’ve washed it. I hope it will, anyway. Will let you know later this week, once it’s dry and I’ve taken another picture for you.

[Thank you, Jeri! I had fun, even if I didn’t produce the sockly equivalent of instant pudding. I’ll get there.]

Coincidentally, Jared had a nice tutorial on spinning yesterday.