August

Well, the rest of the school summer holidays have gone past in a blur of packing and moving.  The move is the result of a job change for my other half.  Some of our belongings have gone into storage (including 2 of my wheels and the four shaft loom!) but most have made it to our new temporary home (including all of my wool stash – except raw fleece).

Once we were mostly settled (there are still boxes – but nothing urgent) I managed to try blending some different fibres on the drum carder.

I’ve not tried spinning anything other than wool – so this was a fun experiment.  I had some soybean fibre to try – but it’s very fine and slippery – so I’ve blended it with moorit and black Shetland tops and a little bit of sparkle for good measure.

I found the soybean fibres very hard to control – they liked bunching up on the drum carder.  However, repeatedly passing the batts through the carder helped to break up the clumps of fibre and the resulting batts look lovely (for some reason they remind me of frothy coffee!).   I’ve been spinning these longdraw on my Dryad wheel.  So far I have two bobbins of singles spun – which I plan to make into a 2-ply yarn.  As yet I don’t have a plan for this yarn (perhaps a Mobius shawl?).

If it’s a nice day tomorrow I’ll take some pictures and publish them here.