Just Going out for a Spin

After finishing my Christmas spinning, I went on to the next bit of roving in my stash, which is a Silk/Merino blend. I completely forgot that I had been thinking about dyeing the roving before spinning it. Of course I can dye it after, and will do (I'm thinking maybe red...), but the point is that I had been spinning plain cream wool for months now, and want to play with something else.


Also, I've been spinning it quite thin, which only makes it take even longer to get through it all.

Also, in the meantime, I went shopping with a friend, and found all sorts of lovely stuff to spin. Celeigh Wool in Millet is entirely like a candy store for spinners, where fluff for spinning replaces the candy.




Like this lovely bit of Blue-Faced Leicester for instance:

Of course I'm quite excited to get to that, but I really don't have the time to indulge in that at the moment. However, halfway through the Silk/Merino blend, I took a break for a bit of a palette cleanser. You see, my friend had also handed me a bit of her Manx Loaghtan to play with, as I had mentioned on our trip that I really wanted to try that. She generously handed me a very decent amount to play with, but a small enough amount that I could totally justify stopping mid-project and spending the weekend spinning this up:

It's not my most even spinning, as I was trying to aim for a 2-ply jumper weight, which required me to spin a fair bit thicker than I have been doing lately. I'd always heard it's tricky to spin thicker again after getting to a stage where you are comfortable spinning fine, and indeed it was, but I think I did a mostly decent job.

The Loaghtan is a lovely colour, and is rather lofty (particularly in comparison to the rather dense Silk/Merino I've just been working with), and, in my extremely limited experience, I would describe it as being not entirely dissimilar from Corriedale. While it could certainly be spun fine, it seems to actually want to have a bit more body to it, so it was a good match for my goal of spinning just that little bit heavier than I had been, and great practice. I may even have enough for knitting up a headband or something; I'll have to measure after washing, (later today, washing is the plan). It feels rather softer plied up than I was expecting, and is nice and squooshy (yes, I'm sure that's the technical term, right?).