In Which the Pirate Idly Spins.

The absolute last thing I needed was to start a new project, except for the part where I’ve been having some downtime at work and there’s an empty spinning wheel next to my desk. This work-from-home thing is pretty awesome. The desk that Michael and I built is nearly perfect: eight feet long, painted teal and yellow, room for my personal computer, my work computer, the letter I’m writing, and a sketchbook too. It’s attached to the wall so it doesn’t shake, and braced underneath so it should never bow in the middle.

Anyway, I found this set of batts in my stash bins while I was moving them around. I bought the fibre in 2009 (yeah, it’s been a while) as dyed locks of 25% mohair/75% Finn wool, and carded them into batts by colour so that I could spin a gradient.

Since I have no idea what I’m eventually going to knit with this, and I’m not in any particular hurry to get the project done, I decided to aim for a light fingering weight yarn. It will take a long time to spin eight ounces of fibre this fine in just the pauses between work, but it might end up as a nice shawl if it’s soft enough.

I pulled a strip off the first batt and started to spin, and… whew, the fibre is drafting nicely! It’s got quite a bit of lanolin left in it, so it’s a little sticky, but in a good way. In a not-slippery way. In a “this is easy to spin fine singles” way.

When I felt like I’d gotten a reasonably good consistency and thickness (thin-ness?) with the singles, I tried a three-ply plyback test – folding the single strand back on itself and twisting it up as if it were three separate strands going into one yarn. The pale green is my spinning; the bright yarn next to it is a strand of Trekking XXL, which is just slightly thinner than what I think of as “standard” sock yarn. I’m right on target.