the first carding of the fiber. (sorry my camera is way overexposing the pink for some reason)

After some searching last night I found the ball of roving I had painted with the leftover dye from painting yarn for Natalie’s Christmas gift. I decided to card it up and ended up with 3 batts.

Now theoretically I should probably have split and drafted those batts, and then mixed them together as I spun. However, being the impatient person I am, I just grabbed the first one and started spinning. Hot damn it’s so easy to draft fresh carded fiber! I was spinning pretty thin so I decided I would end up plying this yarn. So I did a batt and a half on one spool, and the same on another. The first batt I carded 3 times and it still had a lot of purple in it. The other 2 ended up much more evenly blended.

So tonight after work I got plying! I was much happier with my plying today than what I did yesterday…and I actually filled a bobbin. That’s the first time ever for me. So here is my yarn (once again the colors suck. it’s got some very hot pinks, some lighter pink, and bits of lavender too)

I’m so happy with myself today. There are definitely some spots where its too thin or too thick but overall I’m definitely getting better at spinning evenly. Plus it’s a real usable skein at 108yds and 104g.

Here is a closeup

It’s also pretty cool that I used the exact same painted fiber to make this yarn, but with a different preparation I got totally different results.

About 10lbs of wool (merino, domestic, romney, falklands) arrived today, so I’m going to be dyeing and carding more this weekend.

And on a side note, I discovered that when my wheel squeaks it completely freaks out my cat. She stood by me and whined until I got the WD40 out, and once it was oiled up she plopped down next to me and went to sleep.