Spring Cleaning--and Creating!

Got busy today!  I decided to clean my office in 1/2 hour spurts, which coincidentally is the amount of time wool roving needs to cook in the crockpot.  So I thought, why not dye some roving and clean at the same time? That way I'd have a few breaks from the tedium of cleaning, yet still dedicate some solid time giving away, throwing away, and putting away stuff.  Yep, spring cleaning is here!

I am glad to say that I was productive in both ways.  No, I will not post pictures of my office/library because it still looks like a tornado went through it.  There is improvement:  now a path from door to computer desk can be seen, plus I cleared off a bookshelf and put my yarn in tubs on it.  A box of books now sits in the living room, ready to be delivered to Goodwill.

However, as you see, I am posting pictures of the roving I dyed, because it is much prettier to look at.  I may end up selling the roving or spinning it...I haven't decided yet.  It's nice, soft wool: I have one set that is purely Merino wool, so very soft; the other one is a touch coarser, but still soft and has a somewhat elastic, bouncy feel. 

The pictures don't quite do justice to the colors of the roving.  Except for the primary colored one (to the left), which is that intense in color, the others are actually a bit lighter and more pastel than they look here--very much spring colors.

It's been very wet and rainy lately--I think we've had a month of rain and clouds with perhaps half a day of real sun--so I was feeling very much as if I wanted to create some spring if I couldn't have it in the weather.  I guess that's why there's a bit of yellow and green in all of the rovings I dyed today!

Since each set of colors took half an hour to cook, I guess because I have four colorways, I actually spent two hours cleaning!

I think this deserves some definitely spinning time.  After that, I'll put up some of this roving on my Etsy site.   I haven't put anything up there right now, but if you go there, you can be notified via e-mail once I do start up my shop again.

Knitted result

Well, this is the knitted result of the yarn I hand-dyed and hand-spun. I'm very pleased with it. The colors blend rather nicely one to another, and are kind of self-striping. That's the result of the Navajo three-ply method of plying I did with it. The swatch was knitted with U.S. size 2 (3 mm) knitting needles, the size you'd use for socks. So, I guess I have indeed created some sock yarn!

I did try to spin it very fine, but I think I need a bit more twist than I had in this yarn. It's still very sturdy, though the ply is loose enough that if you're not careful, it's possible to pick up a strand instead of the whole ply. It worked out to about 6 1/2 stitches to the inch, but I tend to knit loosely rather than tightly.

All this motivates me to dye some more roving, which I've done, and I'm working on spinning up that one now. It's in shades of blue and green, with slight touches of yellow.