Snail Spirals

I finished spinning and plying the purple Colonial wool on Wednesday, and washed all the skeins yesterday. Here it is drying on the back deck, in all its glorious purpleness.



(See the plant boxes? Remember what they looked like on May 9? See how pretty they are now?!!)

And here's a shot of the finished yarn. This is 39.6 oz (2 1/2 pounds!) and 2518 yards of three-ply, sport-weight yarn. It's about 16 wraps per inch. Love it, love it, love it. This is destined to be a sweater for me, or maybe a shawl, but probably a sweater because I'll get more use out of it that way.



I'm not sure what I'm going to work on next. I don't have any more fiber that's ready to spin (WHAT??? How can that be!) because I need to borrow the Guild's carder and finish carding the Rambouillet x Cormo fleece, I need to finish washing the Merino fleece and card it, and I have two alpaca fleeces that also need to be carded.

The alpaca has a funny story..... I was headed to spinning group two weeks ago, and was debating with myself in the car whether I wanted to stop at the thrift store on the way. I had the beginnings of a scratchy throat (that turned out to be the mega-strep-throat) and had almost convinced myself that I should just go to spinnning, pick up my share of the wool for the Sheep-to-Shawl warp, and go home. Emma was with me, and we were both tired. Debate, debate, I'll stop, no I won't, etc. At the last second before I passed the turn for the thrift store, I thought "If I don't stop, there's will probably be something really great there, and I will have missed it." So I went to the thrift store. And what do I see as I walk up to the door? A big sign that says "Clean Alpaca Fleece: $2.00" on the front of a big box. Inside the box are about six garbage bags full of alpaca! The sight of that sign made me dizzy (though it may have been the strep). I immediately parked Emma in a nearby lawn chair with a magazine from the free bin and dove into the box. Now not all the bags had great fleece in them. Two had a lot of guard hair, one was full of second cuts, and one was really coarse. But the other two were really, really nice!! Woo-hoo! I got a white and a black, both fully skirted, whole fleeces. For a total of $4.00. Now that's a good day at the thrift store.

I'll leave you with a picture of an Orange-crowned Warbler that flew into my living room window this morning. I was merrily twisting up the skeins of purple yarn, when BAM! Poor little birdie. Luckily it was only stunned. It flopped over to the deck rail after it bounced off the window, and sat there for about 20 minutes getting its bearings. It did eventually fly away to a nearby tree, where it sat for another 5 minutes or so, then visited the feeder once, then flew back into the underbrush and out of sight.



Click on the picture for a bigger view- the detail on its wing feathers is amazing.