I may have made a mistake...

Last night at spinning we learned how to ply our yarns. I really think that mine turned out pretty good, for a first time. I looked like a fool while doing it, what with all the strands getting tangled up and trying to keep the wheel spinning in the counter-clockwise motion and remembering to move the in-coming yarn to a new hook quite often so the bobbin would still be functional. But I'm pleased with the results! Now, I just have to wash it and let it dry before the dye-day (in two weeks or so).















But the mistake that I made was bringing home the single-treadle schacht:

I tried to ply the rest of my yarn the last night........ DISASTER! I finally let Fez take over, he seemed much better at it than me:


Note the incredibly happy look on his face as he lays amongst all that mess, yarn and bobbins and all. That was nowhere close to the look on my face at the time. I decided that perhaps I should fall back and re-learn how to spin the normal uncarded fibers on the wheel first. That is my goal for today: re-learn spinning.

As for closing remarks about the Ashford, which I didn't get to yesterday, I don't like it. As painful as it is for me to say, it's true. I'm in love with the double-treadle Schacht and if I'm spending that much on a wheel, I'd better be in LOVE with it. Wednesday night, with a new bobbin on the Ashford, I let the wheel do what it wanted. Well what it wanted was spider-thin lace weight yarn. I filled up a bobbin with said yarn, simply because it was the only way that the wheel and I could get along. There was no peace for me when spinning with the Ashford. If I tried to make the yarn that I wanted, the wheel fought me every step of the way. If I let the wheel do what it wanted, I was unhappy with the weight of the yarn being produced.

I also talked to Maggie last night, she convinced me that I should get the Schacht too.. :)

Then I convinced myself that I needed to be certain that the double-treadle was the one for me and that is why I brought home that trouble-some single-treadle.... thing.

I also brought home some gorgeous fiber, something with a little color because I felt like I might be losing my lust for spinning because of all the bland white-ness that I was working with.


I don't think you can tell, but there are subtle twinges of orange and yellow amidst all the red that should make for an interesting spin. I, of course, won't be spinning this beautiful stuff until I can get the hang of the single-treadle.

Now, onto a more knitting front: I have finished the front, or back, piece of my Alexander McQueen Knockoff. This piece is so long that it is difficult to get an accurate representation of the whole in one shot, so here are two:




















And I apologize for the somewhat inadequate quality of these pictures. I had to take them quickly because this was coming soon:

He makes things a little more difficult than one might want and I didn't feel like fighting him today. Also, I think that those last three pictures will have to be my entry for Eye Candy Friday. They are quite hilarious if you play the 'movie' in your head.