Finally . . .

Finally a few things to share! Here's what's drying on the guest room floor. That's two big skeins - one each of Cormo, and Targhee, and two baby skeins of Targhee. I've been talking about them forever, and finally both are done.

As you can see, I finally finished up the next skein of Cormo. I wish I could say I finished up the last skein, but there is still MORE Cormo to spin. For now, though, I think I'm done with it. So frustrating to spin - I need a break from it. I also spun up another 4 oz. bump of Mountain Colors Targhee, and I finished plying it yesterday.

I love Targhee, and I can hardly believe how easy this was to spin compared to the Cormo I've been fighting with for months. I spun this second 4 oz. in less than a week. Wow! That's pretty fast for me. The colorway is Sandstone. I got this roving from The Loopy Ewe, and I have more it of it in another color! Yay! As for this color, from what I know of sandstone, it's pretty spot on. In this closeup I fiddled a bit with the color, contrast and brightness because it didn't come out very well in the initial photo. It's a little bright, but it's close.

One of the things I love about my Lendrum wheel is the plying (sometimes called Jumbo) head. Those are really big skeins of yarn in that first photo. I'll know the yardage after they dry. They were wound on a 2-yard niddy/noddy (and a 1-yard for the baby skeins), but when you finish and set the twist, the fibers often shrink up, particularly if they had a lot of crimp in the wool to begin with. And Targhee is like elastic. Did I mention I love this stuff? This photo is probably a little closer to the actual color of the wool and remember, it's still wet here.

Here is the Cormo. Looking a little more grey that the first two skeins - but, again, that's probably because it's still wet. It came from the same roving. You can see that I struggled with this roving. There's far more thick/thin and uneven spinning going on in this yarn than in the Targhee yarn. Still, the yarn itself, once it's dry, will likely be nice, and I will have probably around 600 or 700 yards total with still more to spin. I'm considering dying this yarn once I finally finish spinning it all up.

What's next? Well, I'm very excited that I will be attending The Loopy Ewe's Spring Fling knitting retreat again in April 2009! And even better, I'm going to be teaching some beginning spinning there. I'm very excited about this and although I have a hard time thinking of myself as a spinning teacher since I'm still pretty new at it, my own teacher, PatsyZ assures me that I'm well-qualified to teach beginners. I hope she's right :-D

I finally finished these socks. The yarn is Farmhouse Yarn's Fannie's Fingering Weight - or as Knitterary calls it: Dirty Girl yarn . . . check her blog for the story there. ;-D I liked this yarn very much. I only wish it was superwash. The colorway is called Autumn, but it looks like Christmas to me. The closeup shot is a very good representation of the colors. This yarn also came from The Loopy Ewe (pretty much my favorite place to buy sock yarn :-) ). It's a plain old sock - strictly stockinette. I learned my lesson with the last variegated yarn. I did re-cast on for the Spring Forward socks with a yarn that is variegated, but the color changes are not so frequent, giving large bands of single colors, which actually do then show the stitchwork.

Having these socks off the needles leaves me with the never-ending Feather and Fan scarf, and St. Patrick (the Spring Forward socks are my current train project). I'm back down to three on the needles (not counting the alpaca sweater that's in knitting jail because I lost interest in it about a year ago . . . there's not that much left, I should just finish it.

I'm saving two wonderful fiber-related gifts I received for my next post. :-) I hope your holiday was a lovely as mine :-)