It's December, there must be swag.

Saturday was the end-of-year meeting of our spinning group. This is always the Christmas party, an occasion even more social than our normal meetings, with a pot-luck lunch (and oh, so good it was). P&M Woolcraft also bring a substantial portion of their shop to the meeting, and typically we make it worth their while. Yarninmypocket has already commented that she was restrained. I, on the other hand, did my bit to make it worth their while, almost single-handed.


From left to right, some baby camel and silk roving (400g), a fold-down Ashford sampler niddy noddy (to make samples for dyeing) , above and behind the niddy noddy, some brown-and-white merino roving (600g), an Ashford Challenger three-bobbin lazy kate so I can do 3-ply (my Majacraft Gem lazy kate only holds two bobins), one new Majacraft bobbin (I buy one every year) and in the front another 33cm Glimakra shuttle, bringing me up to three of those because I do a number of three-shuttle weaves.

I also splurged a little on expanding my acid dye collection and now feel like a have a workable critical mass. I spent part of yesterday dyeing skeins and caps of silk. I'll post on the dyes and dyeing later in the week.

Although I spent a lot of money, I didn't really buy anything I didn't plan to buy. The hardware was all things I'd requested they bring as I saw a need for it. I rarely buy roving so have none in my stash, and while I've found spinning to be an ideal occupation for my recuperation, carding has proven to be just too hard: so I can't card any of the raw fleeces I have in the house to spin. I'm going to call the roving physical therapy. I've been spending a lot of my recuperation spinning the baby camel and silk roving. You can see two bobbins full of it, ready on the lazy kate. I bought 600g of this last year and want to turn it into a top, but wanted to make sure that I have enough. So I bought a little more again this year, cautiously because at £6/100g it's not cheap...but oh, so worth it. This year's camel is darker than last years, as can be seen in the photo below:


(this year's rovings in the back, last year's in the front). Slightly darker it may be, but it's even softer than the already-soft roving I've been spinning up. At the moment the plan is to ply two strands of the pale with one strand of the dark and compare it to just the pale. The 'dark' is a beautiful caramel colour so I'm hoping it will result in deepening the subtle colour graduations already playing in the yarn. I'm half-way through the third bobbin so will sample within the next couple of days. Eventually this will become a top for me.

The astute will notice that I haven't mentioned the book evident in the to image. Yes, it's a knitting book. No, I don't really knit. Yes, I've already done a sample for one of the projects in some brown handspun alpaca. Yes, I'm being corrupted.