Spinning up a Blank Palate

Things have slowed way down in the garden and the weather has turned cold and blustery outside, so I have had more time to devote to fiber crafts lately.  After I finished the few orders that I had for Christmas gifts, I turned my attentions to spinning up more yarn from my collection of fiber.  I had about a pound of a bamboo/merino roving that I have been wanting to work on, so I got it out and spun it up.

This is the raw fiber processed into an organized ball of roving.  This is the easiest way to work with fiber, though some people like the pre-processing steps, I think they are time consuming so I prefer to skip the processing steps and get straight to spinning.  

This is the roving spun into a single strand of yarn, better known as a single ply.  I combine two single strands by plying them together, or by spinning them together with the opposite twist of how they were spun as singles.  The twisting of the fibers helps them hold together and then this forms a yarn, in this case a two ply yarn.  If I added more plies it would increase the thickness of the yarn.

After getting a spool filled with the yarn, I transfer the yarn to my home made niddy noddy. 

 This allows me to measure my yarn's length and keep it organized when I wrap it into a skein.

This particular spool of yarn came out to about 205 yards or 616 feet.

This skein of yarn is now ready for anything that I want to do with it.  It is a blank slate for dying it any color that I want, or crocheting or knitting it into any shape that I can imagine.  The possibilities are limitless.