What I'm doing with that new spinning wheel

To start with, I'm once again spinning in the Tour de Fleece. This year so far I've missed two days on account of social obligations and my kid leaving home to seek his fortune, but as of right now I've got two bobbins full of this, ready to ply tonight if I get off my rear and clear one of the other bobbins of leftover stuff so I have somewhere to ply to:


I'm really pleased with how it's going.

Even on the days I haven't spun I've made an effort to go look at the daily threads with everyone else's progress pictures. My reactions generally run the gamut between "that is so cool and I will never get there at this rate" to "did you mean to do that to a couple of ounces of innocent fiber?" At least I feel like I'm doing okay with what I'm doing, but at some point I'm going to need a wheel class because I know I'm not using everything on this to its full potential.

I'm also finding a lot of new (to me) online fiber shops. I either need to join a couple of fiber clubs and order about another pound of new fiber, or I need someone to hide my credit card before I join a couple of fiber clubs and order about another pound of new fiber.

More tomorrow!

I bought a spinning wheel.

I have obviously lost my mind. But isn't she pretty?



She's an Ashford Tradittional spinning wheel. And I love her very dearly. Unfortunately, I'm still persuading her to feel the same way about me, as evidenced by this mess:



That is some perfectly good alpaca fiber that I have turned into slightly overspun (except for the places that it's underspun) yarn barf. I've seen worse beginner efforts, but I'm terrified to put expensive fiber on this yet. I'll be playing around with the cheap stuff that I bought with my first drop spindle and immediately got bored with until I'm sure that what I'm making is yarn and not just yarn barf. And we are not going to talk about the big pile of yarn barf that resulted from my first effort at getting a bobbin started by myself. (It's gone. I made it go away. We will never speak of it again.)

But really, isn't she pretty? :)