Monday, November 23, 2009

The wheel keeps spinning

How beautiful is this?


To think that it started out as this...


7 comments:

  1. Gasp!!!! It is so pretty! These are the exact dye colours that I have here beside me. I have been spinning all week to dye skeins for a friend who is about to have a baby. I have some fleece that I was going to toss into the pot to make a multicoloured batch!
    Very very pretty all spun up!

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  2. Those are SO pretty! My grandma has a spinning wheel and I have always wanted to learn to use it. That looks so fun to take something through the entire process from sheep to sweater.

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  3. Sooo beautiful! I'm gonna have to get me a spinning wheel now and a ... sheep. Stunning.

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  4. Beautiful! I still haven't gotten past the whole staring at the spindle and wanting to cry part.

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  5. It looks great! I was thinking about learning to spin recently, but I was wondering how much it costs for the material, and how difficult it is to make... could you please enlighten me?

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  6. It's not cheap, Yofed. Fleece is inexpensive, at least if it's unwashed and pretty much straight off the sheep. Often free or close to it. A decent set of hand carders cost more than a hundred bucks. A drum carder is maybe $300. A spinning wheel can be double that (though a drop spindle can be had for $15, or made out of dowel and a few old CD's). But in our experience fibre buffs love sharing their art and tend to be very generous loaning their equipment out to newbies. I got 'in the loop' by taking a drop-spinning class run by a local knitting store. We've gravitated to ladies spinning at craft shows and farmers' markets and made connections that way. As I recall, NS has a lot of spinners and knitters.

    There is quite a knack to the spinning. We're pretty poor spinners at this point, but the yarn is at least usable. It's very helpful to have someone show you (or at least watch a whole lot of YouTube videos). The whole process is very labour intensive. But for us that's part of the attraction -- doing every step, continuing the project week after week, a bit at a time.

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  7. That is so beautiful. I have begun handspinning in the past few months, and have an angora rabbit now too, whose fur I spin in with alpaca. I'm not too great yet at thin consistency, but some day... ;) I love the colors in the yarn. That is beautiful. I hope to start some dye experiments with the light colored angora and alpaca. Get some color in there!

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