Spinning and Knitting

This weekend I finished spinning my first rovings of wool. I started knitting it into slipper socks. I debated whether to make a purse/bag or slipper socks. The benefit of a purse/bag is that I could take it everywhere with me and see how many comments I get on it ;) but I really needed slipper socks. The ones I had (store bought no less) had a huge hole and had to be thrown out. My feet have been cold. I thought how wonderfully warm this newly spun wool would be for my feet. So slipper socks it is. I have them about 3/4 of the way done. I hope to finish knitting them tonight. I'm excited because I tweaked the pattern to work with the different color wool yarn I created. I have a creamy color, dark brown and medium brown. We plyed cream with dark brown and plyed dark and medium brown, then had just some dark brown left (there was a lot more of the dark brown than the other colors). So for the main part of the slipper socks I used the dark and medium brown plyed yarn. For the top cuff I used the cream plyed with dark brown, and for the toe I used just dark brown. I had to change the pattern to add the cuff (the pattern was for 1 color and no cuff).

J started sorting and washing more of our alpaca fiber. He has been sorting what we can send to the mill this spring. We plan to have some made into yarn, and some made into rovings.

He flicked the fiber of Tucker's that I had washed previously. He made it into what is sometimes called a Cloud (similar to a roving but not tight into a long row, instead more of a billowy fluff of fiber). We wondered if we could spin from this, as in spinning from raw (rather than rovings). Being new to spinning I didn't expect this to go over too well. I was very surprised to see that I could do it! Tucker's fiber is making some really neat yarn :)