So.... you know that spinning wheel? She kinda distracted me for a week, among other things.

So yeah.... my wheel, she made it so I didn't really want to do anything else but spin for the past week.  Hence the distinct lack of blog posts both here and on my photo a day blog.  Sorry!  While I would really like to blame Elphie completely for my little blogging hiatus, there have been a few other contributing factors.

One of my major problems his past week it has been so hot and grossly humid out.  Heat is... not so bad, but whenever there is humidity on top of it, I become pretty useless unless air conditioned.  I just hate that sticky feeling I get in this weather and the only way I know how to deal with it is by taking a shower.  Problem: I can't constantly be taking a shower!  Once night I sat down to spin when I got home and after a few minutes of only treadling and holding the fiber in my hands, the sweat was just dripping of me.  SERIOUSLY?!?!?  I was barely moving!!!! Sigh...

Another reason for my social media sloth was that work has been fairly busy lately.  When I have a really really busy day at work, I basically want to eat dinner once I get home and then go to bed.  Sad.  For multiple evenings this week I have just decided to crawl into bed around 10:00 which is pretty darn early for me.  I usually go to bed around 11:30, but sometimes not until 12:30.  The heat and humidity have just taken all the energy out of me this week.  Hopefully things will become more tolerable this weekend and I can manage to something productive other than spin (although, that's not so bad, is it?).

Speaking of spinning... since getting Elphie last week, I have spun up a few different things.  First I tried out the MissBabs BFL in Rose Garden I talked about and showed pictures of in my last post.  Then I started spinning up a single of a very nice mixture of fawn colored alpaca and silk that my mom got for me a month or two ago.  I have about a pound of that, so it is going to take me quite a while to finish up.  I only did one bobbin's worth because I needed to test out the fiber I was hoping to use for my Tour de Fleece project.  I'll explain the Tour de Fleece in a future post.

I had ordered a 1/2 a pound of Brown Select Jacob roving from Halcyon Yarn in Bath Maine and really liked the color and feel of the wool.  It is a nice dark brown and I thought it would be a lovely color for a sweater I want to make in the fall (once it's WAY cooler!).  So, I spun up a little bit of it on Elphie to try it out and I decided it was perfect.  I was going to order a huge amount of it to ensure I had enough to make my long sleeved hooded sweater which requires 3,500 yards of yarn.  (Hmmmm, I don't do anything on a small scale do I?)  So I went to go place my order only to find out they didn't have the 5 lbs I wanted in stock and it would take 8 weeks to come in.  Sadness....  my 1/2 pound of Jacob will have to be made into something else. 

Ok, now I didn't have a plan.  I had to pick another wool!  After speaking with the very nice and very helpful fiber expert at Halcyon Yarn over the phone I decided to try out some similarly priced and more of a medium brown Shetland Moorit wool.  I just got the tiny package with my 4 ounces of Moorit yesterday and spun some up.  Not bad.  It was rougher than the Jacob, but I hadn't plied it yet.  Maybe that would help make it softer.  I ended up Navajo plying it  which is the process of making a 3 ply yarn out of one single by making a giant crochet chain out of it and then putting twist into the plied yarn in the opposite direction is was originally spun.  It's remarkably simple to do once you understand how it works.

After plying up the first little bit I spun, I decided that the yarn was too thick and I would have to spin the single finer.  So, for the past couple nights I've been working on spinning a very fine single in the hopes of it plying up into the thickness I want.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hopefully I'll have more things to tell you about soon.  Well, hopefully things other than spinning anyway :-)