Shortly before Yule, we got a new landlord. This makes number four, if you're keeping score. It was a pleasant surprise when he and his crew got to work on fixing the building up. There's talk of enclosing the lower portion of the back deck so that it is storage area. We've been told to put the kids outside toy bin down in the storage area of the lower closet beneath the entryway. They repainted the floors of the entryway and the stairs. It looks like a whole new place. It's kinda nice.
Except for the muddy foot prints. Those have been driving me to distraction. As a result, I had Beloved pick up a Swiffer wet jet on his last shopping trip. I wasn't sure how well the thing was going to work on those floors. I am pleased to say that it cleaned things up nicely, despite the neighbors going back and forth over the walkway as I was working. I have a feeling that I'm going to be cleaning the entryway on a regular basis now because it really irked me to see things as a mess. It may be because I'm coming out of a mixed episode, but it bothered me. I have a bad feeling that this business is going to be like the snow removal from the steps and the walk, an operation handled solely by my household.
I've been doing a lot of cleaning over the last few days. I'm not hypomanic, I'm just still trying to catch up on the chores that fell by the wayside over the course of Yule and the half of last week that got shot to Hel by a migraine and general chaos. As a result of doing the cleaning, I am not getting very much done in my spinning or my other hand crafts. I started work on spinning a 1lb pile of fiber. I don't know who dyed it. It is wool. I think from here in NY. The colorway is called 'Plum and Berries' but I'm tempted to call it unicorn fluff. Lots of purple, pink, and blue in it. There's a faint trace of green. It kinda reminds me of the Unicorn Frappe that Starbucks had as a novelty drink a few summers back. Hence the desire to call it unicorn fluff.
I'm spinning a small handful of it on a drop spindle made from a drawer pull handle and a paint brush handle. It's pretty light. As a result, I am spinning stuff that is cobweb weight. I'm not going to spin all of it with this spindle. But I am going to do a good amount with it. I am going to try to set up my distaff (which I loaded up with about a quarter pound of this fiber) in a way so that I can spin off of it with my kick wheel. I'm not sure how successful I am going to be. I've tried this with various orientations. I'm beginning to suspect that I can't use a distaff with the kick wheel. That frustrates me because I want to start producing more yarn at a greater rate.
I am pretty sure I fell short of my goal of a mile of yarn for last year by several hundred yards. I still have two balls of plied yarn to measure. That requires getting the last skein I wound on to the niddy-noddy off. It's been on there since last November. Hopefully it won't be too difficult to manage. I still have to wet it and wack it to make the yarn bloom however much it will. I don't think it will be that much because the stuff didn't have a lot of halo to it to begin with.
I'm about half way through my sample of Horned Dorset fiber. I've been spinning it on my delgan and I plied it on my Ashford Student Spindle. Plying it was a pain in the neck because the stuff just didn't want to cooperate with me. I am going to spin the other half on a different spindle. It will be, I hope, approximately the same amount of singles out of the process and I can ply that to compare to what I did on the delgan.
No comments:
Post a Comment