Silver Baby Llama

The silver baby llama is a dream to spin with. I spun around 40 yards of sport weight 2 ply from one ounce of fiber (The tag on the yarn is inaccurate! I wrote down the revolutions on the swift rather than the yardage! duh!). The fiber cries out to be laceweight though! Think how much yarn you could get from an ounce then!

At $4.50 per ounce, it is truly affordable luxury. Come to the Susan Hensel Gallery to shop or shop on Etsy!

18th annual Women's Art Festival

All things Fibery and Good! Come see what is new at Sue's Luxury Fiber this holiday season!

Saturday, December 11

10am-5pm

Midtown YWCA

2121 E. Lake S.

Minneapolis

There are new greeting cards, new scarves, new colors and designs of yarn, wondrous batts, lots of mohair, and shiny, shiny bamboo roving. AND...maybe more? I am awaiting my first shipment of Ashland Bay Trading Company fiber. Will it come in time?

Aura experiments #1

Tonight I finished skein #1 of a commission, thus opening up the Majacraft Aura for experimentation.

Here is what I did:

I set the white tensioner band on the largest whorl, just tight enough to stay on

I set the green drive band on the largest whorl and largest drive wheel groove

The yarn path was through both the divet and the circular orifice

I got out the Brown Sheep Wool mill end brown & white striped top.

Short forward draw it was a bit hard to get the bobbin to take up at first. I actually started with a backward draw, trying to push lengths of yarn onto the bobbin w/o much luck. Switched to short forward (inch worm) and had no problem. I did tighten the tension a bit and then it went on handily. Very easy to get a fairly large single...a bit thick and thin as short draw is not my favorite, most practiced technique.

Long draw (and supported long draw) I made a rolag of the mill end top. It did not want to pull out quickly like I am used to. I tried to push it on the bobbin like I usually do...no go. But, when I held the yarn taughtly, at a 90 degree angle to the orifice, it went on the bobbin fine. It was the slowest long draw I have ever done, but it would appear to be an advantage for things like spinning clouds of mohair around a core or self core spinning.

Spinning off the fold I expected similar results to longdraw, but fluffiness did not happen. However, I tightened the white tensioning band and was able to do one handed spinning as long as I held the yarn taughtly at a 90 degree angle to the round orifice.

Buy progressively tightening the white band, I was able to easily increase the diameter of the single. One wonders how much fluffier carded fiber would be? I think I was fighting the commercial preparation a bit.