Second wind...

Spinning once again :) Filled a bobbin with the navy/black superwash merino and it only took me an hour. An hour to ply and one more skien done. It goes pretty fast once you get started, but it's the whole getting started that sometimes takes a while.

Spinning was very soothing, very calming and very enjoyable, so much so I ended up predrafting 2 more batches for me to spin up soonish. Perhaps my spinning wheel will not be put up as soon as I had hoped. I predrafted 4 ounces of optim fiber from Chameleon Colorworks in the Midnight colorway. it feels almost like tencel or silk in how it predrafts. A lot of work, and I think I may need to predraft it some more, but it's so soft and shiny. I'm really looking forward to spinning it up.

I also predrafted 4 more ounces of Pigeon Roof Studios superwash merino in the Vanity Fair colourway. I think I did one 4 ounce batch in that colour way before, but I under plyed it and would like to try again. It's not my favourite colour so if I mess up, I won't feel as bad as if I messed up something I really wanted to do well.

I spent some time looking at other people's handspun and I think I'm getting closer to producing stuff that I would like to be able to use to knit things with. I am still having some issues with underplying (loose areas in the yarn), and with consistant thickness. I believe that is an issue with my drafting. I need to predraft better. Or maybe find a better way for me to predraft. I'm told that preparing the fiber well beforehand is more than half the battle, if you do it well, spinning the fiber up is easy.

I've tried predrafting by spliting the fiber into very long very thin strips of fiber and spinning each of those, and frankly I don't really enjoy doing that. I wonder if I can adapt the technique I saw at madrona by some unknown lady, she had one hand on her roving (full size) and the other just sort of pinched the bits that she was spinning, and she spun directly from the roving, no predrafting/drafting that i could see. It looked pretty even, and she wasn't even watching what she was doing. Perhaps it's practice, I don't know how much time she spend doing it, but she looked pretty bored.

In any case I have a ton of fiber to practice on, both in pencil roving format (just to practice spinning and plying, and in roving format where I can practice predrafting and getting even consistant singles.

So many things to think about and investigate, makes me wish I had started doing this earlier. As if I had time. :)