Longer Lengths

Ages ago I showed you some spinning. Then I disappeared into the ether while I finished projects and studied for my exam. I'm finished my course now and the exam went well which is good. I was studying green technology. It's an interesting area if not a little depressing as you see how far we have to go to reduce our impact on the environment.

While I was studying I found spinning was great to do in my breaks. Spinning is easy to pick up and put down and doesn't involve remembering a pattern. It's nice to let your brain drift and have a break while you draft and treadle the wheel.

I finished quite a few yarns. First off I finished the Betsy Doodles batt mentioned above. The batt was from Laura Hogan and it was quite fabulous. The blues and greys were fabulous mixed together. It's a two ply yarn and it's about sport/fingering weight. There's 330m of it too. I'm not quite sure what to make with this so all suggestions are welcome. 

Next I spun up the roving I made using my home made hackle. It spun up really quickly and I navajo plied it. It's worsted weight and there's 80m of it.  I called it Sea Change. I'm still constantly fascinated by how different fiber can look from the spun yarn. I might mix this with some alpaca to make a funky floppy hat like the ones cool surfer types wear.

I finally got around to finishing up the yarn I spun from the silk hankies I dyed using with kool aid. The yarn is about lace weight and there's 140m of it.  I'm hoping to crochet a necklace with this using some pearl beads.

Did you notice how I confidently quote how long each skein is? As if I knew what I was talking about? It now appears that I have been talking nonsense as today I discovered I was measuring my skeins wrong. I'd take the yarn off the niddy-noddy, count the number of strands then multiply by 46cm (the length of the niddy-noddy) and then multiply by two. When I measured the Betsy Doodles yarn I was disappointed I didn't get more yardage as it seemed like I had quite a lot and now I know why. I was in This Is Knit teaching a crochet class and R of She Knit Up That was helping someone measure their yarn with a niddy-noddy. She mentioned how to calculate the length of yarn and said you count the strands, multiply by the length of niddy and multiply by four. Four? Four? Facepalm! Of course it's four.  The yarn goes up and around it four times. How did I not notice that before?

How dumb am I? Obviously doing all that physics in college didn't help with my atrocious adding up skills. I now have twice as much handspun yarn as I thought I had. It's great actually as I was wondering what I'd do with all the small skeins of yarn I'd made. It now seems I have enough to actually make some decent projects from them. So thanks a million R!