My own spin camp

Last week Mr P went back to work and I will be at home with the children until school starts. They are quite low in maintenance by now, so I started on a project of my own. After a feeble attempt two years ago it was time do do something about my desire to spin. There was a bag of beginners material in the wardrobe since last time waiting to be spun. Working a couple of hours every day for a week it has now become yarn:















The skeins were spun in the order that they lie in the box, from left to right. No1 is 50g of grey Gotland wool, also known as pälsull. This was easy to work with, but the yarn is a bit stiff. No2 is 100g of brown BFL (Blue faced Leicester). The BFL was soft and bouncy, but harder to control. No3 is 25g of black merino, which was soft and nice to spin but practising chain plying (Navajo) I overplied it. I am thinking of removing some of the twist. No4 finally is 25g of pencil roving in various shades of blue. This was fun to work with and the chain plying worked better this time.

However, this was just the warm up. For the second week of my spin camp there is 1.400g of alpaca waiting for me! Last time I caught the spinning bug I was at a fair showing my knitting and sharing the room with an alpaca breeder. On June 4th this year I gave her a call and asked if she had any wool for me. It turned out that she had sheared her little herd of ten animals before summer and she had three bags of wool left; brown, white and mixed. I bought the mixed bag and it came from the lovely Minita Miniy who was grazing in the paddock waiting for her new foal that was born the following week.















I hope I can do this wool justice, but this time I have to practice some carding as well. My goal is to make myself a cardigan and get some speed and productivity in my spinning. Wish me luck!