Rhinebeck 2012

9 Rhinebeck

So excited to announce I finally got to go to Rhinebeck this year! I have been wanting to go to this show for several years now, and the gorgeous weather was one of the deciding factors to take off and go last minute (we even got the chance to spend the night in Manhattan making this the perfect trip for me. I love the country, but adore that city – the creative energy!). I picked up some great raw fleece at the fleece sale (the most organized I have ever been to I might add) as well as a few other goodies – check out my bounty!! I will be posting all about the show on my family’s blog; once it is completed I will post a link to it here! Can’t wait ’till next year! 🙂

Fiber Experimentation

Yarn Experiment

From left to right: mohair, mohair/wool mix, colorfully dyed llama, brown yak down & angora/wool mix.

 

I’ve been going through my fleece bins ans spinning/plying yarns from different fiber sources. I want to get a feel for the different fibers so to determine what I would like to continue to spin on a larger scale in the future. So far I have enjoyed every type and learning the pros and cons of spinning each. It is going to be hard to narrow down. 🙂

Spinning Yak Down

7 Yak

This summer I purchased a small bag of yak down to try spinning. It is amazingly soft/fluffy/airy and short stapled, so a light touch is definitely needed as well as a very short, inch-worm type draft. I put my pulley on medium with a soft uptake (my Lendrum is a scotch tensioning wheel). I found the large pulley didn’t give the enough twist so the fibers drifted apart easily which would be annoying during plying. I really wanted to keep that light airy feel in the finished yarn. The finished project in another post…