Defiant

I had to go into the city on the train yesterday. It's not a long trip, but by the time you add a few minutes waiting at the station and the possibility of delays, it's certainly too long a trip to go without a knitting project. I didn't have anything suitable on my needles. I did have enough time for a quick rummage through my odd balls box. There was a wool-silk blend from several years ago that I'd forgotten about. Now it looks like this:

These wristies are so solid that they stand alone! Yet the merino and silk fibre is kind on sensitive skin as well as being warm. And I defy any winter wind to cut its way through this fabric!

Slow

I'm still spinning the "red rock" wool-silk. There's a bit of it in the pic unspun and draped randomly with something green.

The green is my pigface. I'm still waiting for it to grow enough to be transplanted into the garden. Overall progress is slow. I guess life's like that sometimes, but I'm not the world's most patient person.

Spinning for Pleasure

It's been too long since I did some regular spinning. On the back of my knitting efforts yesterday, I cleared off several bobbins. Next step was a good dose of spinning for pleasure. I'd picked up a bundle of hand-dyed wool-silk on a recent visit to the Guild. the visit was officially to the library, but there were some delays and I found myself in the Craft Outlet . . . you know how it goes. Good news, the fibre never made it into the "stash". Here it is spun and plied up with a strand of silk filament. I'm about to wash the skein and then it will be ready to knit. Since I turned on the heater for the first time yesterday, I figure it must be time for a new scrap of woolly comfort to wrap around my neck.

Twist

Twist is what holds spun fibres together in a yarn. The finer the yarn, the more twist needed to keep it together. I've been back at my spinning wheel the past couple of days--it's been too long since I spent time regularly at the wheel. I'm working on a small amount of wool-silk blend. I'm aiming for something fine and strong enough to use for embroidery. Here's where I got to this morning:
If I can make yarn like that consistently today, I'll be a happy spinner. I may yet need a little more twist, since I'll lose some when I go to ply it.

Delicious

I hadn't seen my friend V for weeks. It felt like way too long. So we arranged for her to come over for a coffee yesterday morning. The weather and other commitments were conspiring against us, but still she came--on her bike, in the rain . . . And here's what she brought to show me:It's her latest work on Esther Aliu's Red Delicious quilt. V normally favours machine piecing in her quilting, so watching her develop her skills in aplique while working on this quilt has been fascinating. I'm not the only one of her quilting friends who is subconsciously keeping count of the number of times she says, "Ouch" when the needle finds her way into a fingertip. But the result is far from Ouch, I really like it. And it's perfect to accompany a morning coffee. That's what I think.

As for me, I've had at least one appointment each day this week, so I needed a take-along project too. I've picked up one of my pet skeins of handspun wool-silk. It's been hanging around the house for a couple of months now and I had no plans for it. I've started a little capelet. If I knit from the top down, I don't have to worry about how far the yarn will go, since anything longer than a few inches will work just fine. So I have the pleasure of watching the colours appear on my needles. These aren't colours I wear, so it will have to find a home when it's finished. I somehow don't think that's going to be a problem.

Temptation

I've still got several skeins of silk and silk-wool combinations to complete for my folio, but I let myself get a little bit side-tracked and here's the result: It is wool and silk (60%-40%), but it's not homework. It's one of the First Editions colour blends. That's the tops you can see on the right of the pic and the yarn I've made from them on the left. These colour blends are so tempting in the packet and then comes the challenge of spinning them up without ending up with a muddy bland soup of colours, which is what tends to happen if the colours are not separated and emphasised somehow. The more colours in the blend, the easier it is to end up with mud. What I've done is strip the tops down to separate off the different colours as much as I could. I spun them on the fine side and then plied with a strand of blue silk. You can see that the resulting yarn is a lot less vibrant than the original tops, but the colours are there in a subtle way. I really do need a little voice to remind me of the risk of mud every time I see these wonderfully alluring packets in the Craft Supply!

Flight Report

Here's the fibre I bought to accompany me on my trip. Wool-silk (50/50) hand-dyed in brown-purple. This half is more brown and the other half is more purple, but all of it is gorgeous:I chose this fibre because I figure a little bit of it will go a long way in terms of effect. I can see lots of positive attributes in my tiniest safest spindle of all, but efficiency of production is not one of them!

Here's a pic of the fibre with the little Pax Spindle. I've put a 50 cent piece next to the spindle whorl to give an idea of size--that's an Australian 50 cent piece:
The flight was fine--delays, turbulence . . . who cares! I had my fibre and spindle with me. I wore the little spindle as a shawl pin onto the plane to circumvent any concerns with the XRay machine. Then I found I was sitting next to a member of the airline staff in the plane--on her way home after a day's work. After a moment's hesitation I just went ahead and started spinning. It's more of a hand-spindle than a drop spindle, but it works fine. The first comment I got from my neighbour was, "that's a smart way to get around it!". No-one seemed at all concerned and I'll happily do it again on my next flight.