Spinning

but first... two pictures of the pantry with stuff in it.

I was very happy to be able to get stuff into the pantry and off of the basement floor. You may notice a lack of canned items. There is a narrow shelving unit right at the bottom of the stairs in the basement that looks like it was just made to hold cans.

It had a door on it, but the door scraped on the floor even before we covered it. I'll have to take an inch or so off of the bottom if I want to use it. It isn't a high priority. The funny thing is that we didn't even know that the unit was there until after we moved in. There was a tall panel of wood that I guess we just figured was some sort of wall or something until I noticed it had a handle. I've thought about painting it, but that isn't as pressing as painting the pantry was. Starting on January 22nd and ending yesterday I spent my crafting time spinning up some roving. I bought this at the Fiber Expo this fall and had originally wanted to spin it up and ply it so that the plies were different colors and then knit it into something fantastic. I've been eyeing some of the yarn that the Yarn Harlot has spun and was aiming for something like what she'd done here: http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2013/03/14/bad_breaking.html Then I decided to try to keep the colors together in the plies so I would just have a variegated yarn. Looking back, I kind of wish I would have stuck with my original idea. I had two braids from Happy Fuzzy Yarn in purple and yellow. They are 4 oz each. I guess they called the colorway "enchanted". You can see it here (second row from the bottom on the right), except it isn't BFL but a mixed breed wool roving. http://happyfuzzyyarn.com/shop/product.php?productid=17614&cat=0&featured=Y The first braid went quite well. It was very long and doubled back on itself, but I could see that it was repetitive enough to just break the length in half and the two halves should give me something similar. Toward the end of plying the first bobbin (I could only fit about 2 oz on each bobbin) it got a bit off, but I just stopped and took some of the yarn off of one so they were in the same spot. One bobbin ended before the other, but I was able to add that bit I took out and ended up with just this left over:

I call it a win :) I guess this is the only picture I have of the first plied yarn (and a single from the second)

You can see the mixing of the colors on the one on the left. Here are the bobbins of singles from the second braid along with the second plied bobbin. I couldn't find my niddy noddy so I used my inkle loom to wind out the yarn to measure length. The first bobbin of plied yarn is on it. Again you can see the color mixing.

The second braid didn't go as well. I didn't take any pictures of it plied on the bobbins, but a few times I took a segment of yarn out of one of the singles to match the colors up. I ended up giving up trying to match the colors in the end. I had 8 oz of roving total. I ended up with 287 yards (230 if I leave out the badly color mixed one, which I probably won't) of 2 ply yarn. If I wrapped it right, I ended up with 9 wraps per inch, which appears to be a worsted yarn. Now to figure out what to do with it.