For starters, I took the green wool I was working on, blocked it, and wound it up into a little ball. I don't have a nostepinne (though it's on my shopping list for this year, assuming I make it to MS&W again,) so I made my own simple ball-winder out of a scrap of tightly-wound wrapping paper. It's not nearly as satisfyingly pretty but it'll do!
The ball band is a little scrap of wrapping paper, it happened to be at hand and I think it's cute. I'm tentatively going to call all my work "Hannah's Hopeless Handspun" because I like alliteration and self-deprecating humor. Really I think it's going better every time I pick the spindle up, so I can't complain.
Anyway, of course I did realize after I'd used a bunch of my nice roving that I had some slightly less fancy stuff lying around from Sheep & Wool 2010, so rather than keep making a mess of the gorgeous merino I decided to have some fun with the little bits, figuring I'd feel less awful if I wrecked those. So I picked up the little purplish 'tail' here, which I think cost me a dollar, maybe two....
And then I split the piece, because my understanding is that with wool dyed this way, that's how you get some repeats of the color changes. Also it made it much easier to work with! I think all told I split it into five sections, maybe? And spun each one in turn, joining it to the end of the last.
It was a great success! Though there are still some thin spots and some thick spots, overall it's much more consistent than the other stuff I've been doing and I love how the color came out. Interestingly there's not much white to it-- even though there was a lot of seemingly undyed roving, the color spread out quite a bit, though it is still quite variegated. I didn't try too hard to make it a consistent pattern in spite of having split the roving, I just wanted it to have more color changing than I thought it would if I spun it out as it was. So it's pretty cool!
The pictures don't quite capture the color-- there's more red to it in places than my camera really acknowledges-- but I think it's gorgeous. I just wish I had more, I don't know what I can make with such a darling little skein!
Next up... well, it's a tough call. I've got the big green coil of wool in the first picture here (cheaper than the nice green stuff from last post,) which I think should produce a reasonably big skein and keep me occupied for a while. Or I could push myself and try one of the trickier fibers-- I've got two bags of silk hankies I'm a bit nervous about starting with, or a big bag of hemp fiber which I don't mind messing up, but which is really tough to spin, as I remember from previous attempts. I'm leaving the nice merino and the gorgeous silk roving in reserve until I feel like I won't totally destroy it.
I guess we'll see how I feel!
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