Monday, August 18, 2008

Been learning to spin!

For just under a month now, I have been teaching myself to process and spin my own yarn. Yesterday I finished a skein of yarn, and it's the first one of which I am not too embarrassed to post:

This is 300m of a 2 ply laceweight yarn (100g odd), which is approx. 22-23 wpi and knits up at about 10 stitches/inch. The singles were about 35 wpi, and z-spun.

The wool is from a Drents Heideschaap fleece, which I am slowly working my way through. It is surprisingly soft, but the trick to getting nice yarn from this fleece is to remove the longer (harsher) hairs from each lock. If you leave them in, you will end up with a very scratchy wool.

This yarn is spun worsted because I want to make a pair of socks out of it. Here's a close-up of the 2-ply still on the spindle (the Aussie 5c coin is the smallest coinage I had in my wallet).