Insubordiknit

Corn and nettle spin

I'm a freakin' student again! And an art student to boot. Tonight was my first class and it was awesome! It was design 101, not much to you seasoned artiophiles (huh?) but to me newbie, pee-in-my-pants cool! My prof. is nice and funny and helpful and my classmates, at least those in the immediate vicinity of me, are the same. Strangly, it's many olderish (like me) people. So hopefully the egos will be a bit tamer than with those crazy kids.

In other news, the b-ill has been hard at work on my yarn shop, it's set to go live ultra-soon! I've been standing over him, peck-peck-pecking, so not too much news on the spinning and knitting front. I am knitting something that's going along very well and quick, but it's a secret.

I did manage to squeeze some spinning in today though. A new frontier for me, plant fibers!

Here's my first attempt at the amazing ingeo, which is corn, folks! Yep, there's some extra twist in there. It's mostly orange with a bit of red and some red shimmery goodness.

My second attempt looked a bit better but had 2 breaks where I joined, gotta get used to joining non-I'll-hang-onto-anything-wool. It's really interesting stuff. The recyled aspect of it really speaks to me, plus the planty-ness of it. Pretty easy to spin once I got the hang of it, a bit sqeakier than wool, but very smooth and silky. It pulls a bit like yearling mohair, you can just gently pull your hand back and it drafts itself, the trick being, for me at least, is to make sure it drafts itself the thickness I want. It's so soft and shiny, like a baby's bum, if it were made outta shiny and well as soft stuff.

Next I took out the ramie, which starts as a nettle plant, an herb I took a lot of as a pregnant gal. This wacky was a bit harder for me to control, what with all the hair flyin' everywhere and the sneezin', jeez. I'm not quite happy with the result. It made such a firm, ropey yarn. It makes no sense that with such a firm yarn my hands automatically went to making a boucle. Yeah, huh? It was a total failure as a loopy, frolicking yarn. Anyway, I'll definitely try and try again.

Also, and I know I run the risk of getting zero responses by my placing this request down at the end of my mundane post, but here I go -- I'm in the market for a drum carder and wanna get some opinions. Who's got one and do you like it, love it, hate it, wish it had a feature, lacked a feature, did the damn dishes etc? Please, lemme have it!

Posted by jacey at August 29, 2005 08:53 PM