Wool To Yarn.. What A Pleasure

I took a bunch of yarn off my wheel last night. It sure feels good. For two weeks I've been spinning and because the spools are so big, and I'm spinning so fine,... well it seems like I will never get the spool filled.... and then I have to spin another spool before I am able to ply the two singles together to get a nice stable yarn. The good thing is that the plying goes very quickly and all of a sudden, where I had an unusable mass of unstable singles on my hands, I'm now sitting there with loads of 2 ply yarn... to the tune of 650m.
The washed yarn is on the right and the kinky stuff on the left is what I am washing today.
Woo hoo! It makes you feel pretty good. Today I have to blend some purple rovings with some dark strawberry red rovings and spin them for the little bit of plum that the jacket commission requires for contrast. It's going to be nice I think.

Meanwhile my silk samples for my level 3 are calling. I've been searching through my supplies to find Bombyx silk. I have some but it is not enough I think to do what I want. I need it for my woven silk sample. It is going to be beautiful. And that's all I'm saying about that. Meanwhile, I'm going to spin today a knitting yarn out of Tussah Silk. That will give me a bit of a break from the jacket commission which I have been spinning for the last five days pretty much non-stop. Tonight is knit night and hopefully I will get the finger I'm working on,on my knitted lace gloves, and one more done. I would really like to get this set of gloves done before the end of the month. Then I have a request from Daughter #2 to, "please, please, please, finish my wristlets, Mom!" So that will be my next knitting project.

The last thing I have to say is this. When I decided to purchase cotton cards I had decided on a set from the Howard Brush Company so I ordered them and then afterwards, thought about all the cotton blending I would like to do and worried that the very fine and soft teeth on the Howard Brush cards wouldn't hold up to the other fibre I would be using. I panicked and ordered a set of Ashford cotton cards which have a much smaller number of picks per inch allowing you to use them on other fibres too with ease. I got the Ashford cards for Christmas and the Howard Brush Company cards a while ago. The Howard Brush cards languor in their box waiting for me to get my guts up to spin cotton. In the meantime I decided to try out my Ashford cards on some Alpaca fibre from my own animals. Boy am I glad I got that very brilliant idea. They are super on the alpaca. Far better than regular wool cards for preparing the alpaca.
See how wide the pics are on my regular cards on the right which is great for wool especially coarse wool. While the finer pics are great on my very soft and fine alpaca.

This picture shows the difference between my regular cards on the right and the Ashford cotton cards on the left.

I am so pleased with how it is working out, and I think I am going to be very happy with them all round..... what am I saying?!!! I already am happy with them. I'm looking forward to getting my silk samples out of the way so that I can try out my Howard Brush company cotton cards on my cotton samples (Hubby has them stashed away to give me for my Valentine's gift). The one thing that has come out of all my carder issues is that some time in the future, I'm thinking cotton blended with alpaca would make an awesome yarn..... I'm not sure if that will be something that I can try in my level 3 homework...(I will have to look more closely at the questions on blends and see if there is room for experimentation).... but suffice it to say that there is no worries with the Ashford cotton cards so far.

So there you have it.... I'm fired up for another day of washing skeins freshly off my wheel, blending and spinning a contrast colour for the jacket commission, and a little silk spinning before knit night tonight. A day of work??.... not a chance.... I call it a day of pleasure.