I shouldn't have done that.

I finished spinning the purple/pink silk I was working with. Yum, chock full of fibery goodness:

Of course, I'm planning to two-ply that, so I needed to get half of it onto another bobbin. Unfortunately, I don't have a bobbin winder, because I just haven't been able to bring myself to spend that much. I do have an eggbeater drill, but would you believe I do not have a single dowel rod that would correctly fit into either my cardboard storage or my old non-WooLee Winder wheel bobbins? All the dowels in this house, and yet not one is the right size.

So, I figured I have enough WW bobbins, I can use the WooLee Winder. I set up the wheel for Irish tension (brake band on the flyer), braked the flyer nice and hard so it wouldn't move (and thus wouldn't add or remove twist), put the drive band on the bobbin and started treadling.

This was a mistake, because no other method will ever be acceptable again. A bobbin winder with a travel screw! Why hasn't someone made this? It has to be what industry uses, or something similar. I want one! And if I can't have one, continuing to use the WooLee winder in this manner is extremely tempting. (However, since I only have 4 WW bobbins, I think I will at least go get a dowel that will fit into the cardboard bobbins, for storage purposes.)

Here's the divided singles, on the Kate and ready for plying:

I love the background in that pic because it's the most delightfully geeky thing.

Finally, I promised pictures of the Ishbel scarf. Here it is on the blocking wires:

I wasn't super fastidious when laying it because it's meant to be a functional winter scarf. It'll get crumpled almost immediately.

Hee hee

Listening to me go through my stash of spinning fibers must be funny. "Hankies. More hankies. Ooh, other hankies. Hey, still more hankies!"

I really like silk hankies.

I'd forgotten how much awesome stuff I have in my spinning stash. It's mostly silk in various forms and alpaca, with a few other fibers. One of my cats is allergic to sheep's wool, so I'm mostly wool-free, but... Well, I'm not a saint. There's a hand-dyed braid of roving in there that I got just before she was diagnosed because I had promised it to myself after finishing something or other, and want to keep that. There's a huge ball of a beautifully dyed English Longwool I won as a door prize one year at a kinda-local fiber guild event. Then a few odds and ends with some significance.

Mostly, though, I've got a lot of silk in various forms, a lot of alpaca in various forms, and a whole lot of sheep-free, brightly colored fibery love. :)

I love my spinning wheel

This is not a new phenomena. I've had my spinning wheel for, oh, I guess it's right about two years now. But I probably haven't used it for about a year. I pulled it out again yesterday and starting working on it. Ooh, this is fun.

Union rules require that I post a picture of the singles on the bobbin:

This is some silk top I had. I suspect it may have been the leftovers of two or more dyeing batches. Some pieces of it are very bright pinks and purples and fuchsias, while others are a more subdued grey-purple and grey-indigo. When I started it spinning it, a year or a more ago, I had a plan on how to manage the differences. Damned if I can remember what that plan was now. ::shrugs::

I figure I'll spin it until I run out, divide it onto two bobbins and make a two-ply. For other animal fibers I prefer 3 plies, but I generally two-ply silk. That structure shows off the sheen of silk well, plus you get more yardage. Silk is only going to fluff up so much, so I don't find that a 3-ply has much advantage.

Now I need to find the silk hankies I was halfway through, pull out one of my (great many) pretty drop spindles and finish it up. I do remember what I was doing with those. They were a blue-green mix with the ones on top being more green and the ones on bottom being more blue. I'd split them in half by color, and planned to ply them together to get a mixed blue-green effect.