Sunday, September 30, 2007

What's going to have to happen?

The title is in reference to my feelings about school, and what it is going to take in order for me to do my schoolwork. I love my readings and I love being in class, but oh my, between papers and groupwork, I am so not into it right now. Sigh. Some of the things I think need to happen are 1. more organized workspace 2. more organized binder 3. less groupwork 4. more good eating (this weekend was full of the very good, but very bad, kind) and 5. good hair days (I got my hair cut so hopefully that will happen soon). Anyhoo....

So here is my spinning stuff for mom. First I buy lots of yummy fleece. This here is 100% mohair. Very slipperly. But beautiful.
Then you take that fleece and you pull it and pull it but you never break it (well, sometimes you do, no big deal really). This is called drafting. Then your fleece is drafted and reading for spinning. So this is impossible to take a picture of without a friend there, but this is a 'representation' of what goes on: you spin the spindle and feed the drafted fleece to the spindle, and voila... yarn. (not so voila, there's more swearing involved and dropping of the spindle, but remember, this is just a 'representation'). Then you get singles! Singles have a lot of energy that will slant your knitting, so you can leave it as is, or ply them. To ply, I put my spindles into center pull balls, and then you can either ply singles to each other, pulling the center out and plying it with the outside, or you can ply two singles together. I wanted a really long skein so I plyed the two singles together.
This is a bad shot but basically, I put the yarn into little tubs with holes cut out of the top and then spin the two singles together, but this time you spin in the opposite direction. This turned out to be waaaay too much yarn for my poor spindle but I managed to get through it. And then you have the prettiest yarn you ever did see me make.

And now, back to the soul-draining paper. And oh yeah, if someone could come cook me dinner all this week, that would be awesome.

Thanks. (next blog, more talking- less whining, I promise!)




ETA: you may notice the progression of natural light in the photographs. I did all this spinning in one day (it's a gift skein) and started at 11am, finished at 9pm. I also did laundry but mostly, spinning. All day. It was more exhausting than I expected.

5 comments:

brooke t. higgins said...

wow.... I am so totally impressed with your spinning that I can hardly stand it. Your yarn is beautiful.

You can do it! You can do it! Yay you! I would make you dinner all week if I could!

Anonymous said...

I now understand it so much better. I am a totally visual learner, no doubt about that. Listening just doesn't do it for me. Thanks, hon. Your yarn is beautiful. And the school thing will work itself out. These stumbling blocks happen every so often. Love Mom

Anonymous said...

You are still my hero for spinning and plying that whole bag o' fibre in a day. Amazing!

Angela said...

Oh. My.

So beautiful! And if you weren't most of the country away from me I would totally make you dinner all week in return for you teaching me how to spin like that. I'm in the swearing stage.

Sara M said...

Pretty! I don't blame you for wanting to ignore homework when there's spinning to be had :)