Thursday 15 September 2011

Spinning gets a look in

I have, as you will probably have noticed, been joining in with lots of memes and link parties. This is good, it gives me things to write about on days when my brain might be a little slow and lacking in inspiration, but it occured to me that I had not mentioned spinning in a while. So here is some spinning news.

The first half of the Shetland fibre I won on the Chopped Tomatoes blog has been spun into a thin single using my drop spindle (you have seen this picture before as a space filler).


I planned to navajo ply this on my wheel, because I make a mess plying on the spindle and I am sure you need at least four hands to navajo ply on one!

I carefully slid the nice neat spool of single onto a knitting needle in my shoe box lazy kate, and it all started going wrong from there.

The box was not wide enough so it kept jamming and not turning as I pulled the single up towards the wheel. Without thinking I decided to pull the needle out of the centre and just work from the singles sausage.

Spinners of a sensitive nature may wish to look away now!

Ugh- tangles!


It is not quite as bad as it looks, it is not overly tangled for the most part, but it is very slow going as it has to be carefully unrolled, then ply a length, then repeat. I think this will take a long time to finish, but I will spend a few hours on it this weekend and hopefully make some progress.

8 comments:

  1. Oh wow to the tangles ... I'm one of those odd people that likes to untangle wool, not that I'm offering my services ;-)

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  2. You just reminded me of another use for all those shoe boxes I took from a neighbor.

    The singles on the spindle are very pretty. That last picture gave me the shivers.

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  3. I've never tried spinning, but that last picture is terrifying!

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  4. Oh dear! That looks awful, on the spindle it looks very pretty so fingers crossed on you getting it all untangled. I am a very beginning spinner, I just finished my first skein of two ply ever! So thanks for a spinning post.

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  5. It looks so neat and nice on the spindle though the second picture looks more like my attempts with the drop spindle over the last few days lol I hope it doesn't take you too long to unravel

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  6. oh dear, i think i'll wait a bit longer to learn! good luck this weekend!

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  7. Oh goodness. These things happen along the spinning journey. I guess they are adventures!! Hope you manage to untangle. The colours are beautiful. It is refreshing for you to shar when things go wrong as well as the successes. A while ago for some crazy reason I decided to tumble dry a beautiful shetland fleece dry after a couple of really wet days trying to get it dry. What a mess! Won't do that again! Best wishes

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