I've been wearing it several days a week all winter and I'm thrilled with the way my first wheelspun has held up to such constant wear.
You can see that the above photo was taken in the fall, and the truth is that I've done almost no work with my spinning wheel since then. You see, the third floor, where my wheel resides, is simply too uncomfortably cold in the winter to make spinning there enjoyable. It's still ridiculously cold for the middle of March, but there's enough sunshine coming through the windows now to provide sufficient radiant heat to make life pleasant, at least in the afternoon. All this is to say that I've decided to spin for a new sweater project. Much as I love spindle spinning, it's more practical to spin a sweater quantity of yarn on a wheel. Last week, this arrived in the mail from the Fibre Garden.
It's a couple of lbs of Blue-faced Leicester top in a lustrous creamy white. It's more than I'll need for a garment, but I like to have extra to muck around with. As soon as it arrived, I started in on a sample of the yarn I'm aiming to make.
I am still, by any measure, a novice spinner, but I'm very happy with the result, which isn't far from the weight and feel of Rowan Felted Tweed DK (without the alpaca). I adore the way that newly plied yarn relaxes and fluffs out when washed and dried. So, now I'm trying to spin a little bit every day until there's enough to get knitting.
My other current project is a design with Shelridge Farm's W4 in "Moss", which Lyn, the dyer, tells me is her most popular colour--and somehow so appropriate for spring. This is a top-down project and I'm just past the underarms and ploughing ahead until I get to the interesting 8 inches of fern lace at the bottom of the cardigan.
This colour signifies the same thing that this does........
hope.
