Osborn Fiber Studio

The saga of Avoidant Spinning (and its corollary, Avoidant Blogging) continues. For most of last week, the Yarn Room was about the only room I could spend any time in without feeling oppressed by the unpacking still to be done. So I pulled out some roving that had been languishing in the stash for over a year, just to see what happened.

This pretty stuff is an unnamed “wool blend” from “Fabulous Fibers.” Calling itself “spun sugar,” this is about the only true roving I have in my fiber collection. Most things that I call “roving,” I discovered not too long ago, is actually “top” – top is prepared in a completely different way, and although the final prepared fiber looks the same, it makes for a completely different spinning experience. After the MD sheep and wool “spin in,” wherein for spinning competitions we were all given some simple roving that was impossibly easy to spin woolen, I was hankering for something like this that I could just blast into something thick and wonderful.

In two weeks, I’ve spun 3.5 bobbins. There’s at least half of it left.

I admit, I had my doubts about this color when the very generous Barb W. gave it to me as a destash. I’m not really one for bright colors, and I worried it would look a little too ’70s orange. But now that I’ve spun nearly a pound of it, I’m in love. It puts me in mind of sunflowers, just past their peak, about to yield their towering glory to seeds for the winter. Like sunflowers, this yarn rocks its large size and bold color. We’ll see if I can rock it when it becomes a garment.

As soon as I had three bobbins full, I whacked out a couple wee samples to see whether I would be making this into a two ply or three-ply. The answer seemed pretty obvious. The two-ply comes to about 8 wpi, a heavy-ish worsted, and the three-ply comes to 5 or 6 wpi, a vairly serious bulky. Aside from the fact that I have a general prejudice towards three-ply, and that I’ve been collecting bulky sweater patterns for other reasons, the three-ply is vastly more balanced. This spinning is far too haphazard, and a titch underspun, to work well as a two-ply sweater yarn. And maybe the third ply will give it a little more durability, since the spinning is semi-woolen-ish.

I have a little over a week to get the rest of this cranked out, until Mom comes up to visit for our (hopefully first annual?) mother-daughter spinning retreat!