Weekend wrap up

Do you ever find yourself with a little extra downtime and wonder where it came from?

That happened to me today.

Weird.

But you know what?

It was all in my head.

There was no free time, I just forgot half the things I was supposed to do today.

Including my fiber wrap up.

I did a lot this week, but I'm gonna cruise through it, cause I still have to go do my night barn check and I'm already sleepy. :)

1.  On behalf of ideas hatched but untested, I did some blending -- half super soft Bluefaced Leicester lamb wool from Caterpillar and half even softer and super lustery Pygora fiber from Amelia the goat. I've never done any serious blending before and don't really have the tools for it, but I made do with hand cards.

The locks - Amelia's Pygora locks on the left and Caterpillar's BFL locks on the right.

On the cards.

The blended locks. I didn't try to make a continuous ribbon of top or roving or whatever. I just stuck with the locks as they came off the cards.

On the wheel.

Before washing. Oh geez. My spinning sucks. :(

After washing. Better. I got about 100 yards of single ply from 1 ounce of the carded fiber. It's not as shiny as I expected it too be and I'm still trying to understand why.  (Shrug)  I'm sure it will make a lovely soft scarf regardless.

2. On Wednesday I got a call that the Weaver's Guild wanted their spinning wheel back. Apparently 6 months (or was it a year?) was long enough and somebody else wanted to borrow it. Phfft. So with a Saturday deadline for returning the wheel, I decided to spend more time just practicing my spinning. I had a bunch of commercial roving sitting around unused that got sacrificed for this purpose. I won't go into the painful details (oy), but suffice it to say that if I want to spin decently on a wheel, I'm gonna be needing more practice. A whole lotta practice.

3.  The Guild wanted their table loom back as well! Sheesh. ;)  This was more concerning than the wheel. I put a nice linen warp on the loom back before Thanksgiving to work on horsehair pieces, but have made little progress on that, cause the horse hair is just SUCH A PAIN TO WORK WITH. (There, I said it.) Anyway, I tried, half-heartedly to get the horsehair going, but decided pretty quickly that I would never be able to weave off the entire 4 yards in any reasonable amount of time THAT WAY. So rather than lose the warp altogether, I switched gears and used other, faster wefts.

Linen on linen.

A bit of unspun Icelandic tog that I REALLY liked. I'll probably try to do more of that.

And silk.

I gave the wheel back to the Guild yesterday. I'm keeping the loom for another week or two until I finish the warp. It sure looks like I need to go equipment shopping. :)