Marathon woman

In our "Biting Off More than We Can Chew" department, I give you my two latest spinning projects: an 8 oz. coil of blue Corriedale/silk, and two 4 oz. wine-coloured braids of local alpaca/bamboo.

The Corriedale/silk thing had me stumped for the longest time. I've already posted the story of how I circled it cautiously, trying to figure out how best to spin it, before finally hitting on the idea of drumcarding it into blended batts. That worked beautifully: the two-ply yarn has both drape and a bit of crunch, and the colours distributed themselves fairly evenly throughout. There are some shiny slubs, where the silk kind of bunched up as I drafted it, but I'm not unhappy with it—I'm fond of "character yarns" that show their roots a bit.Granted, it took for-freaking-ever to spin, and now I think I know why: having skeined it all and counted the yardage, it turns out I wrung about 1,200 yards of yarn out of that one long, heavy coil of fibre. And then there was the alpaca/bamboo mix, purchased from Turtlepurl Yarns and Notions. I dove into the first hank of fibre right after I got my wheel; mostly, I wanted to try out the smaller flyer, I think. But once I'd started spinning it up, I felt committed to finishing the lot. It was fun to spin, and although I found ample evidence that this fibre had once been worn by a living, breathing, hay-eating alpaca, it didn't bother me. As I say, I like a yarn that knows where it comes from.

Like the Corriedale/silk, the alpaca took a while; and again, when I tallied it up at the end, I discovered I'd spun about 1,000 yards.Of the two, the alpaca/bamboo is definitely the softer yarn, with a fuzzy halo; the Corriedale/silk has more heft and body, and will probably do very nicely in something that calls for a little shimmer. But I'm in no real rush to knit either of them up; for now, I'm content to sit back and contemplate the magic of twisting fibre into yarn.