She needs some repair before she can be used.... AND I need some skills before I can use her.
My upskilling finally started with a little bit of focus on the Long Draw Spinning Technique in my medium-wools class in June 2025, Spinning Goldilocks.
Several of the students requested some guidance on the Long Draw Technique, so for me it was serendipitous.
I had been working on making Rolags in my Clemes & Clemes class the day before and I had some reserved from an earlier Clemes & Clemes class.
So with a bunch of appropriately prepared materials, all I needed was time and focus for practice. :-)
With the Tour de Fleece 2025 complete, I figured now is as good a time as any...
First up is to decide which rolags to start with, and I decided on this Purple+Orange Blue Faced Leicester. The colors are layered, so it should hide my mistakes pretty well... and of course, the quality of the Rolag is pretty bad. lol.
One thing to note about this project, is that I am giving myself permission to be bad at something... AND putting it in a public space. YIKES. Not that many people are still reading this blog, but it will be discoverable by anyone. Double YIKES.
Learning is about improving skills... or at least going from a place of relative incompetence to a place of better competence in a target topic area.So in this case, I am objectively a good spinner in Worsted techniques and I am reasonably competent now at preparing fiber for Worsted spinning... but I have spent very little time working on Woolen, or even semi-Worsted techniques. So this project is intended to chronical this journey.
It does seem to be going faster than my typical, Short-Forward-Draw, but I have much less control over the consistency of the yarn. I do expect that to improve with practice.
Even though the gauge of this yarn is all over the place, there was only one tiny bit that was over-spun. It feels lofty and squishy... which is the point of using Woolen Spinning Techniques.
I find it interesting how color plays... how a color looks depends significantly on what it is next to. The finished yarn looks Maroon+Gold rather than purple+orange.
7/8 oz (26g), 54.7 yards of 2-ply
Happy Fiber Arts Friday!
