Tag Archive: Daisy

Time and Time Again

Note to self: Dyeing takes at least twice as long as you originally planned, so be prepared!

Yes, I’ve had another long day in the kitchen. All I wanted to dye was the Rebecca yarn.

The Finished Yarn!

The Finished Yarn!

The dye bottle was supposed to dye two pounds of fiber. I have a pound and a half of yarn. The instruction sheet for Jacquard dyes recommends a half bottle of dye per pound of fabric. I decided to play things safe and put in a half bottle of dye for the pound and a half of fiber. Well, the yarn turned the color I wanted before the solution even got heated up!

Still Spinning Away

Norwegian is finished! All thirteen ounces of it spun up into six nice skeins. Don’t ask me about the yardage; I don’t know. This yarn is destined for Kool-Aid dyeing (assuming nothing goes wrong), and hopefully it will find a happy home.

It is now sitting on the drying rack, along with as many other yarns as I could fit. The New Year’s Dash worked great, but I wound up with tons of yarn to set the twist in.

And I’ve started on the merino roving. I’m spinning it into a two-ply sport weight, which I will dye a deep shade of red (using cochineal!) and then crochet into a sweater type thing.

Thin Merino

Thin Merino

Spinning Away

Despite the fact that I was in the middle of spinning the brown wool, I went ahead and started playing with the Norwegian roving. It spun up quite nicely! I was pleasantly surprised. It was rather inexpensive, which made me think it wouldn’t have as good quality, but I was wrong. It’s a nice, squishy yarn, with just enough coarseness that I think it will wear well. The first skein wound off at a squeak over 70 yards. No clue what the others wound off at.

Three Skeins

Three Skeins

Sweet!

I have worked with the alpaca and come out on top. I have conquered, and I’m loving it.

A Bobbin of Joy

A Bobbin of Joy


It’s really weird how different it is from regular wool. I can’t think of how to describe it expect that it’s “buttery-er” than wool. It kind of slides along. I’ve been spinning it on the Walking Wheel.

The original idea was to try for a sport weight yarn, but I don’t know if that’s what this will turn out as. I spun a gazillion little samples to see what the best amount of twist would be. (And promptly forgot which sample went with which amount of twist.) But, the alpaca seems to be behaving, and I’m getting pretty good at separating out the coarser, slippery hairs. Wait, that sounds funny—how can something be slippery and coarse? . . . but that’s really the only way I can describe it.