Warping On

Yesterday and today I spun half of my Merino and Tencel blend and it was very different.

• First I spun a full bobbin which took me HOURS and now my back hurts.
• Second I found out a many things when spinning

• The fiber is very slippery so it will draft very fast
• You need to have your hands far apart for it to draft well
• I found it difficult to keep the yarn even (not have big bumps in it) for one of my first spinning projects.
• Once I got the hang of it. Spinning went fast. The trick was keeping my hands far apart.

I have only spun 1 bobbin so I still need to spin another full bobbin and then I will able to ply them together into yarn. I will be using our plying head for the first time which should be fun (YEA . I am also excited because I will be making A LOT of yarn all at once and not end up with many short skeins.
I do not know what I will do with it when I am done but I am Sure I will find a use.

Here is the bobbin #1:

Since I have finished my last scarf I decided to try a satin next. I warped on Saturday and have been weaving on it since then. This is not a full scarf I am just weaving a sample so I get the hand of it and find out everything before I start my scarf. I just started to making samples. Since I could only make plain weave on my last loom there was no point to make samples but now I find them VERY handy. With this sample I found out that I need floating selvedge’s . I am still able to weave and its looking amazing.

Here is the front:

Here is the back:

As you can see the warp ends up showing on the back and the weft ends up showing on the front.

This is the first time I saw the back since I started weaving. I released the tension and flipped the piece over and I was floored. WOW!!! I could not believe how nice it looks and how nice it feels.

I will keep you updated.

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I have been working with my new loom and I have finished my first scarf. It looks great. Really great. This is my first loom that has more than 2 shafts. So I decided to make one of the hardest looking things I could find a lace scarf and it was FUN and I am done.

I think it looks really really good.

It was fun to weave and went really fast. Having pedals on a loom is AMAZING and makes weaving go very very fast.

Now am looking through my weaving resources for my next project and I think I am going to try to make a satin. It looks like it will be fun and it something I could never do on my rigid heddle loom. First I am going to weave a sample using some of my left over yarn and it it works out well I am going to make my next scarf a satin.

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Our ashford spinning wheel was not working correctly and my wife and I have tried to fix it. First she tried to glue the spokes but that did not work. Then we took the wheel to Carolina Home Spun and she let us take apart one of her wheels and try a new wheel in our wheel. This still did not help so we bought a new wheel a Lendrum Folding Wheel

I really like the new wheel its SOO much more fun and a lot easer to use I do not have to fight the wheel at all it just works

I am tech geek (a programmer). The people I work with ask me why do you weave?

Well, when you work with computers there are days when you come home and HATE i mean HATE them. The last 2 days have been that way. Last night as I was leaving our Colo the place we keep our computers lost power for 3 seconds. Does not sound bad right? Well it was it took us over 2 hours to recover. 1/3 of my computers about 50 boxes rebooted and they were NOT happy. I could say more but it would be boring.

Then today around lunch time we had 2 or 3 different things go wrong and again it took HOURS too fix. Then it took me ALL day to figure out this one (Should have been simple)  problem.  Again i HATE computers.
This is why I weave I need a non-tech outlet and tonight when I go home I will get some time to weave and NOT think about how wonderful computers are

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Today I went shopping at my local spinning and weaving store Carolina Homespun as they were having a sale today. My wife and I where just there last weekend but we went for the sale.

They had some very nice stuff on sale but I was not really interested in any of it. This happens to me all the time I go to a store and I always want the most expensive items. So after looking around I found these. Its goat fiber from peppermint pastures and when you buy the wool you know which goat it came from. I bought “Kamille” and “Moonlight”

I also bought a Merino and Tencel blend its very very soft and slick I cant wait to spin it up

I don’t know if anyone noticed but I have a new header image. Scamper took a picture of my weaving and made it look nice and made it fit so Thank You very very much.

I hope you all like my new header image. It is an image of my weaving

Last night I sat down to ply my yarn into umm well yarn.

This is only the second time I have spun and it was not as even as the first time. I thought I did a good job spinning till I plyed it into yarn. That is when I saw how big it became. Some of the sections are very very large and some are very very thin but there are some that look good. I think I over plyed and under plyed a bit but I am happy with it for my second try at spinning.

This is before I set the twist.

I don’t think its good enough to weave with as a main color but I can use it as a cool accent

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I tried spinning on new years day. My wife has a spinning wheel and I had never knew why she wanted to spin her own yarn. I would always ask why don’t you just by the yarn already made.
So on Jan 1 2007 I thought I would try it and it was fun and very relaxing. I did have to concentrate to be able to make anything and I did not do a good job but it was my first try so I did not expect much.
I had used my wifes fiber I just bought some of my own fiber

The blue one is merino wool and the gray is merino wool with silk. Today I spun 2 bobbins half full of yarn/fiber (I don’t know what to call it) and tomorrow I will ply it into yarn. It took me about 2 hours to make the 2 bobbins

I don’t think this will be my best yarn there were some very big and very narrow parts of the yarn and I think I may over spun the yarn because I could not keep up with the wheel. Well I will see what happens tomorrow when I ply them together.

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