Life has been busy. A lot. Infringing on creative impulses. Stuff like ageing parents, an injured son (ankle - no basketball playing right now, my husband is doing a lot of driving him around, which I can't do due to work schedule), continued challenging situations in getting included in the team at work (while I think I am slowly finding my bearings). I won't go into detail on any of these. But when I come home from work it is difficult to sit down and sew, usually I can only sit down and knit. Which I have been doing a bit.
Currently I am working on a sweater from one strand of handspun silk, combined with a strand of baby alpaca and some other silk.
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| Excuse the lack of smile, I am not good at all at taking selfies... |
It's been cold, which has definitely been a hindrance to the garden, although the rhubarb is peeking out. The first cake of the season (yesterday) was, however, made from store bought.
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We did go to sort of celebrate a belated 20th wedding anniversary by having a meal at the restaurant where we ate after the civil ceremony way back then, at the Hotel Grauer Bär in Kochel. The weather was less agreeable than on the day, and it wasn't really meant as a celebration, but it was as delicious as then. And the view just as good, even without sunshine. (I was stunned that two people on the personnel were there who had already been there more than 20 years ago.)
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And I took part in a private spinning 'class' on controlled spinning of various thickness of yarn, which helped me unterstand my spinning wheel much better than before. Looking forward to results, this picture is only a sample from the afternoon, I don't have any of the orange.
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Hope that things slow down, cheer up a bit, spring takes over, whatever, to get my creative juices going again.
do hope things go on the up for you soon. Best wishes Irene in N Ireland
ReplyDeleteHaving never done any spinning (well, maybe 3 minutes lifetime total in various workshops and hands-on exhibits) I don't understand much of the concepts. What is the advantage of spinning two yarns together (as in your orange sample) compared to simply holding the yarns together as you knit (as in your beautiful red sweater -- one of my favorite colors)?
ReplyDeleteKathy - when spinning, you put a twist onto the fibers, people at my stage of expertise need to balance that out later, otherwise the knitting will have a slant. Perfect spinners might manage to only twist as much as needed, but many people add a counter-twist after filling the bobbin. That's when you want a single strand. You can also balance the yarn by adding the counter twist AND combining with another strand. That makes the yarn more stable (when combining the same type of thread), often more interesting, as when you are combining different kinds of threads (the orange and black above), and thicker. It's called plying, and depending on the thickness of the threads combined it will affect the final product you achieve. Plyed yarn knitted gives a different effect, too, than if you just knit the two strands together without having been plyed before.
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