Wow! Progress by the Spinning On The Edge people with the fiber sandwich swap sure exceeds my own. Here's Misty's blog entry, be sure to check her lovely skeins.
My fiber sandwich got unpacked, de-compressed, and is now resting in a cardboard box near my wheel ... soon, soon.
The local Spinning Over The Edge group has spun "scrap" yarn now -- roving with scraps of yarn mixed in. Mine looks a bit like a dog toy (sigh) and was still tossing scraps of yarn when I whacked it after washing it, to help it felt and grab the scraps better. So, I'm not so sure about this one.
My plans for a Pacific Northwest lap rug continue with this yarn -- and my dear son (10 yo) has "donated" his first two complete skeins to the project too. Talk about a lovely mom memory! Wow. I will treasure his work more than my own. He found it too loosely spun for his just-learning-to-knit-ness, so we are back to the spinning wheel to work on a tighter spun yarn for him. He really wants to knit with his own yarns, so we'll get there, eventually!
Next up on the local SOTEs is sequin yarn. Last time, we threaded our loose sequins and "prepared" our sequin trim, this coming week we'll be spinning it up into roving. I imagine the threaded sequins will work out a bit like threaded beads, should be fun. I just have to pick which roving I'll spin it into -- the green? The pink? Hmmmm.
I've turned into my own private one-person study group too -- the siren call of coil yarn was just too strong! The first attempt, with a blended fiber, was just too monochromatic to show off the coils well. So, attempt #2 is waiting on the bobbin for plying time, it's Montana Darby Dawn from Crosspatch Creations, so there's pale pink, hot pink, and fuchsia. Sometimes it marled (2 colors spun at once) but there are nice lengths of single colors. Here's hoping like does _not_ meet like in the plying!
My other desired self-study is "snarl" yarn. I couldn't believe it, I've been daydreaming about this yarn without a name, and then I find it in Elsie Davenport's 1950's book "Your Handspinning"!!! and again in a just-published creative yarns book (title escape me, sigh). So I'm pretty sure I'll be playing with that, either with the fiber sandwich or just on my own.
So, what is a snarl yarn? It's typically a 2-ply yarn, with one of the plies allowed to ply on itself and hang down from the main yarn. Pretty frequently -- the snarls can be an inch apart, and they can be short (1/2") or long -- 3"(!!), consistently sized or varied. Hey, it's not called novelty yarn for nothing! So, once I spin my snarl yarn, I _promise_ to dust of the old camera and upload a photo of it.
