I spent a lot of my recent Saturday spinning. It’s nice to finally have such a long period of time where I don’t have to do anything. Here’s what I did:
I finished spinning the shetland roving that I’ve been working on for a couple of months. This was the first big batch of wool that I bought after my return to spinning this spring. I got 2 pounds (which is my standard order size) of a lovely grey and I spun a DK-ish weight 3-ply yarn.
Since I’ve gotten back to spinning I’ve been spinning a lot of 3 ply. Since I intended to knit from my handspun stash in the coming months, and I like the way that 3-ply comes out, I feel like it’s worth the extra effort. I’m also trying to spin more of the kinds of yarn that I’m likely to knit with, that is yarn in the neighborhood of worsted-weight yarn. While I knit a lot at finer gauges, I often have pretty good reason to use machined yarns for those tasks, but I think having a stash of heavier handspun yarns is sort of the way to go.
I also started and spun the first skein of my next spinning project. I bought some Corriedale-Cross (2 lbs) at the Yarn Barn in April, and I’m spinning that into a more worsted 3ply. It’s a harder wearing wool, but there isn’t a lot of crimp and it’s not particularly rough. It has the other advantage of being incredibly inexpensive, considering how nice it is and given my intentions for this project (keep reading) it’s perfect.
I want to knit a guernsey-style sweater (thought it might have more cable work, if I get intense about it,) and I want to have a sort of firmly spun, rugged wool for this sweater, and I’m afraid that merino would be too soft. I also have two pounds of merino for the next project. More on that as it develops. But yes, spinning continues apace!
Also, I think that it’s going to work out that I’m going to be spending the fall knitting sleeves to sweaters again. These things happen. But the next sweater that I cast on will probably be something from my handspun. Incidentally, I’m predict a cable phase soon.
Onward and Upward!