January 25, 2012

What am I into today?

Spinning.  LOTS of spinning.  No... I'm not talking about spinning like an exercise class... I'm talking spinning yarn on my spinning wheel.  The picture at the right is me spinning at Campland when I was 34 weeks pregnant with Cody this past April.  Yes.  I was camping, in a tent, at 34 weeks pregnant.  We had a blast!  But, the pic is so you see what I do, spinning.  I really enjoy spinning.  I'm enjoying all things that have to do with fiber.  You will find that I go through stages of what I'm into craftwise.  Sometimes I card fiber day after day for a week, and then I weave for days on end, and then I spin, and yet other days, I dye.  :)  I'm looking forward to summer and nice hot days when I can solar dye again. 

Back to today.  I spun 2 entire skeins of yarn yesterday and finished another.  Here's pics of two of the skeins. 

  The pink and green one is silk. Yes, silk.  100% silk from silk worms. Silk is very interesting to spin.  Lots of fun, but it's a different technique than wool.  I'll come back to spinning techniques another day.

This one is from what I call a mosaic batt.  It's from all sorts of different fibers that I pull together and then card them.  I know... some of you are thinking, what the heck is carding fiber?  Right?  LOL  (runs off to find a pic of me carding fiber)

This is a carder.  My brother in law, Greg, called it a death machine.  It is a death machine for knuckle skin if you aren't careful.  It has lots of little metal teeth.  There are two drums to move and comb the fiber through.  What you don't see is a handle that I turn to turn the drums.  It makes the fiber smooth and easy to spin from. 

This is what it looks like when I'm using a screwdriver to pull the fiber off the drum.  The fiber comes off all fluffy and soft!  I like to card outside because any waste fiber just goes onto the ground.  And I can just brush any VM (vegetable matter) that comes out of the fiber onto the ground too.  The birds around here are going to love me come spring.  I better be rewarded with at least one colorful nest that I can see!  :)







I really enjoy all things fiber... but back to today:  Spinning.  I'm spinning some batts to make some yarn like the one pictured above.  I spun two different batts and then plyed them together to make that yarn.  I think it came out GORGEOUS!  I almost don't want to sell it, but I need to.

What else am I into today?  Pink eye drops for Cody 3 times today, and preventative ones once each for Austin and Audrey.  I need to bake bread today too.  I have been using this recipe as my daily bread.  We are really enjoying it and it's really not hard to do.  It's more that you just have to have the time to let it rise. It's a total of about 10 minutes of 'work' and my Kitchen Aid mixer does 95% of that. 

What else you may ask???  Audrey decided she wanted underwear today.  She insisted when I tried to put a diaper on her and she yelled ans screamed at me.  So, she's in underwear and leggings.  My timer will be going off every 30 minutes for her to try.  Where did I put those M&M's now?????  ACK!  Off to find the M&M's for bribery.  Yes... I said it.  Bribery.  Every time she tries she gets 1 M&M.  Every time she goes, she will get 2. Hey.. if it works, wonderful!  I'll update tomorrow on our potty training progress!

Happy Wednesday!