Spinning for a hat and a shawl

I didn't do a lot of spinning during the break, partly because I was working monomaniacally on Bitterroot, partly because I was having some issues with Rosie the Elephant. Near the beginning of the week, when the weather was warming up, she started to moan like a haunted house. This usually started about 20 minutes after I started spinning. I also noticed treadelling was harder than usual. I discovered that the metal parts at the back of the wheel were heating up. Add to this that the fibre I'm using is not well prepared and there was not much incentive to spin.

A note on the fibre: It was dyed by the very talented Stranded in Oz and is two lots of her fibre club, a light blue merino and a dark blue alpaca and a whole lot of Angelina. It was carded by me and that's where the issues are coming from, the original fibre was wonderfully prepared.

I had a really good look at the problem yesterday and identified where it was rubbing and have (pretty much) fixed it, it turned out I just had to adjust one of the rods at the back. Now spinning is flowing again for me, and yesterday I finished the singles.

I was on such a roll that I plied it immediately and got this:

It's almost impossible to see in the photos, but the Angelina gives the fairly matt yarn wonderful glints of light and movement when it is in the light.

This is 205 meters / 150 grams of what was a sport weight before I washed it, but is now probably a double knit weight. I'm going to make Gudren Johnson's Norie hat. I'm a little under yardage, but the majority of people seem to leave of the final repeat, so, if necessary I will do that. Then I'm going to spin up the rest of the fibre lace weight and make the Homin shawl from her Shetland Trader book. I've got 90 grams of fibre left and need 435 metres, which should be fine (no pun intended) as long as I spin it thin. I'm a little nervous about getting yardage, but I accidentally managed more than that when I spun the rainbow yarn on my Turkish spindle, and that time I was aiming for sock weight. Wish me luck.

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What I made, by Sharon

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