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It’s been a big weekend for me. I spent some quality time with my spinning wheel and got the hang of it. I am not a pro, but I think I can make some workable yarn at this point. It was rough. There was lots of swearing, exasperated sighing, and even some drinking of frozen Margaritas and Sangria to ease the pain.

It started out with me treadling like a maniac and having my tension all sorts of screwed up. Here is the result:

I know what you’re thinking and no, that was BEFORE the alcohol. It really is that hard to learn and nothing like a drop spindle. That is two hours of swearing there folks.

After a couple of drinks to calm my spastic treadling leg down and some good quality time adjusting my tension, I managed to come out with this for my second bobbin:

It’s still overspun, but it’s workable. Okay, maybe not workable, but at least not laughable.

The resulting yarn from my second and third bobbins (there was nothing I could do with the first, it’s a casualty of The Learning Curve) is … yarn. Kinda. I don’t know if I will evern use it for anything, but I got two and a half smallish hanks. Can I say that plying was SO HARD! I just didn’t want to go backwards after fighting for hours to go forwards properly. And yes, more booze helped there as well.

I will probably keep it for sentimental reasons, but the twist is not even on the first and second hanks (Yet more casualties of The Learning Curve). The half hank ended up not bad.

They were all unbalanced and needed to be washed and weighted in order to lay straight. But hey, it’s not too bad. And it’s at least yarn. I think my biggest fear was that I would just produce a mess.

I was so hooked on the adrenaline of trying new things that I even tried some acid dying for the first time. I should have taken pictures of my “method” (really using that term loosely here, guys) because I thought this roving was going to turn into brown soup. I was aiming for a kinda fall look in the yarn and really sort of dumped things in the pot. Once it started looking really muddy I thought I should try to save it before all that dye struck and quickly started to rinse it.

It’s not super ugly. And surprisingly, I like how it’s spinning out. It is really squishy and has gradual changes from yellow to orangey-brown to different intensities of greens.

And yes, I am doing WAY better on this yarn. It’s also not cheap crap fibre that I got for free like the red and black stuff, so it’s nicer to use.

All in all a pretty productive “First Time” weekend!