been busy

Hiya from a.,

Sorry we don't have a lot for you this week, as we've been busy.  What I can show you is a roving dye I did.  This was the cvm, one of the sheep the FLBs picked up at the Harvest back in the spring (if you troll through the posts you can see the oatmeal, with dark strands colour it was).  This is what I ended up doing to about 5.5 oz of the stuff.

It is called Algae Sea Foam Shame (this is about 2 of the 5.5oz).  It is spinning up really pretty, you should see the results in a few weeks.
Now because that is all I really have for you, please enjoy a picture of b.b.

He loves this cardboard box more than anything we have ever bought him, so we endure having a big empty box just sitting in the living room.

Spirit of 1986

r: This is my latest creation which admittedly took awhile to get done (layers can be a pain). Its a painting on canvas celebrating old school geekery and will eventually be finding a home over the bed rather than beside the scratching post. 1st layer, titanium white acrylic base coat that was subsequently taped off with blue painter's tape. I covered the whole thing in tape and then removed strips in order create stripes. Then spray paint. Spray paint is so wonderful, I mean just delightful, and I'm not just saying that because lately I've been inhaling a lot of paint and glue fumes lately. After the spray paint came the stenciled pac-men--which was the easiest stencil ever and a silkscreened arcade box you may remember from another post. I'm pleased with how it came out. It's very striking and modern I think.

Spin Cycle

Hiya from a.,

I have been spinning yarn for a few months now, you've seen the posts.  I just thought I would take the time to show you how it has been coming along, in a big picture sort of way.   This is to date the handspun that I have made (with the exception of the moulin rouge, which was made into a nifty scarf):

It may be a little hard to tell from the photo but the handspun is arranged in order of thickness, with the blue colonial top on the left being my thinnest, and also most even to date, and the pink of the far right which is a mix of wools is a fairly chunky yarn.
I have a couple of photos here to show you in better detail the thickness of the yarn (I could discuss wraps per inch, but only one of the three people who read this would know what I'm talking about).

That is my over exposed finger, but it really lets you see how this yarn turned out.  3oz ended up spinning around 270 yards, and I still have another 3 or 4ozs of the colonial to play with.  Now you might be wondering how I know the yardage of the yarn.  I do not have a yard counter as those are expensive.  Instead I have this:

r.  recently purchased a three headed guitar stand (since he is up to three guitars), and I stole one in order to skein out my handspun.  I was able to set it so that one loop around is just a shade under 2 yards, which allows me to know roughly what I have spun (because I am a sad, strange little person I re-skeined all the yarn so that I could know yardage and so that they would all be the same length skeins). 

Now to show you something neat, here are two skeins from the pile.

This was the same fiber, spun on the exact same spindle, I just changed how much I drafted as a I spun, which led to the one hank being twice as thick as the other.  It should make for a fun project to work them together somehow.
Now I am a bit of a fiber floozy, so that when I get new fiber, I want to play with it right away.  Sometimes I am responsible and finish what I have on the go, and other times, I wind off however much or little I have on a spindle.  This leads to the pile of singles that I have floating around on various paper towel and what not rolls.

It ends up looking like the Island of Misfit Toys, but scarier than this is if I open the Mobile Spinning Station (and pull out the bags from the closet)

This would be what I have that still needs to be spun up (there is a maniacal giggle running through my head as I see that photo).

Enjoy.