Jane of All Trades

I confess, my spinning has slowed down for the past couple of days.  I have picked up some knitting projects again, and taught my daughter and her friend to spin on a drop-spindle (which was too fun), but the Tour de Fleece spinning has slowed.

So I figure today is as good a day as any to take a look back at some previous spinning projects.

 Here we have the first yarn I ever spun.  I used a drop-spindle and some blue-faced Leicester (BFL) roving I dyed using Kool-Aid.  I was thrilled with the colors, less so with the process of spindle-spinning.

Here is more from the same roving, the very first yarn I even spun and plied on my Baynes wheel.  It was eventually knit into a very floppy hat.  Fun colors, though.

Around about the same time, I dyed this BFL and spun it.  Also Kool-Aid.  The colors made me very happy, though I’ve had trouble photographing them accurately.  Very robin’s-egg blue.  That roving was eventually spun and plied and knit:

 Into this very fun pattern from Knitty (Yes!  See that?  I believe I have just successfully hyperlinked some text!  Hot damn!).  I love this pattern (alright, it’s Foliage) and have knit it several times.

And finally, there is this lovely roving (Merino, I think) which I hand-dyed (again, the Kool-Aid).  I divided the total roving in half, and dyed each half for a long color change sequence.  Then I spun half of it, plied it, and knit it into a capelet for Daughter #1, starting with the red at the neckline and transitioning to the blue along the hem.  The second bump will eventually be knit in reverse order, blue along the neckline, for Daughter #2, ideally while she’s still small enough to wear it.  I should get some pictures of the capelet…

So why it wouldn’t occur to me that my dogs would be even more intrigued by a possum-fur-roving than I was, I don’t know.  But here was the result:

Actually, that was not quite accurate, because the *real* result was four ounces of what had been neatly-coiled sliver rendered into bits and pieces and spread all over my room.  I almost cried.  Almost.  Instead, I gathered it all into a box and ignored it for months, then dragged it out last week for the Tour de Fleece.  And here is the result: