Hi!  For the past 2 months, I've been working non-stop on getting a bunch of yarn dyed and patterns written for the business I have with my partner, Gail.  We were getting ready for our debut Trunk Show extravaganza at our LYS, Craftsman Hill Fibers.  Anyway, as a result of all this, I've had absolutely no time to spin, and it's driven me completely batty.  But the trunk show was Saturday (and it rocked!  Yay for people buying stuff! ), and during the time we were there, I was demo-ing spinning yarn on a drop spindle.  I used a bunch of random ends from the roving that we dye (we always dye a larger piece than 4 oz, so we take the leftover bits and spin for samples).  Anyway, here's what it looked like on the spindle:



And then here's what it looks like today, after blocking:





They're not really my colors at all, but it was the first time I had just combined a bunch of random rovings together into one yarn, so that was really fun.  I'm looking forward to doing more of that.  I'm also really curious how this knits up.  I may make a hat out of it.

Anyway, the show was a lot of fun, and it was cool to see people be so interested in spinning - there was a 10 year old boy named George who actually bought a drop spindle (well, his mom bought it for him) because he thought spinning looked like it was so much fun.  That was probably the highlight of my day.  I've got more photos of the yarn (and a few of the show) on the blog (http://cidermoon.com/WordPress/), if anyone's interested.  It was a hoot. 

I missed Fiber Friday, because I was working on the following (these are my first big spinning projects just for me - yay!)

So, I dyed close to 8 oz. of mystery wool in these obnoxiously bright colors - lime green, turquoise, purple, hot pink, and melon.  One of the balls turned out a little bit lighter than the other, so I prederafted both balls into 8 really long strips (the whole length of the roving) and then would alternate which ball I would get the roving from while spinning, so I'd get a long area of bright colors and then a long area of softer colors.

Here's what it looked like in progress, with some of the roving strips with it:



Here's after I got done with the single (I used 6 of the 16 long roving strips on this, so I still have 10 left to spin!).  That's a mighty full spindle!



I had originally intended to sping this a bulkier single, but the yarn wanted to be spun thinner.  So then I decided to ply it with a thread to give it a little extra strength.  I was thinking about using a silver metallic thread, but was afraid that would look a little too Princess Sparkle Pony.  But then I figured that yarn was headed in that direction anyway, so I decided to go all out and ply it with a Sulky Holographic thread.

Here's my plying station (ingredients - one Market Day mini-omelate box, on size 11 knitting needle, and one size 3 knitting needle):



Plying successful!  Unfortunately, when skeing the yarn, one area that went uber-thin snapped on me, so the skein has a knot in it.  But that's all right.  My first skein of the stuff weighs in at 3.5 oz. and is 179 yards!  Here it is in its full glory:



And a close up:



Princess Sparkle Pnoy - this yarn wants to be your best friend, come over to your house, eat cupcakes and play Barbies.

Here's my other yarn - Frostnip!  Two skeins wound up being 162 yards total, and around 4 oz:



I wasn't sure what to do with just 162 yards of something, so I do what I always do when I'm in this predicament - I make a seed stitch scarf on size 13 needles (it's my comfort area, I guess).

Here's an artsy shot while I was working on it:



And here's the FO!  Yay!    :



I really like it.  It's not too long, but it'll stretch a bit after I block it and be a perfect springy type of scarf, especially since it's kind of lacy.  Thanks for looking and bearing with me. 

Hi everybody - just started spinning on a drop spindle last week, and wanted to share some pictures of my first efforts.  These are all small lengths of yarn (nothing over 30 yards, anyway) that I spun up to see how the roving I dyed would turn out to look like (a friend and I own a business wherer we sell, amongst other things, hand-dyed yarn and roving - however, neither of us could spin until recently, so we had no idea how the roving we were dyeing was actually translating into yarn).  So anyway, here are some sample yarn bits and swatches from the latest roving batch:





This one was my favorite, because the roving looked so hideous, but once spun, all of these beautiful soft colors started to appear:





Here are some on their little toilet paper tube bobbins before skeining and/or plying:



And here's a perfectly innocent ball of roving, being threatened by my evil kitty, Ellie:



Enjoy!  Hope this posts okay (It's my first time attempting photos - I'm scared!)