I am out of the habit of blogging. Clearly. As a result, I’ve started this sentence approximately four times, so far, and deleted each iteration. (I think that most blog posts that get composed in my head start somewhere in the middle of a story or even the middle of a sentence… then I sit down to write and think “hey, perhaps starting in the middle is not so wise; to do so might confuse my readers…” which in turn brings me to wonder where any of the stories I want to tell here began in the first place).
So. This story begins a long time ago, when I had first fallen in love with spinning, was at the peak of my yarn-and-fiber-acquisition-period and I joined a fiber club. I’m still in said fiber club, but two years (and not nearly as much spinning as I’d hoped) later, I am amassing fiber at an alarming rate relative to the rate at which I am spinning it. Having noticed this a few months ago, I set a goal of spinning the fiber that arrived each month before the next month’s shipment turned up and, all excited about my fresh idea, I trotted out the spinning wheel, sat down to spin a fairly recent fiber acquisition and… well, suffice it to say that several months went by and no spinning was accomplished. Until last week.
In a moment of realizing that online shopping and budgeting worrying generally about the acquisition and organization of STUFF was not only failing to make me happy but was in fact making me miserable, I thought two words: Make Something. And I looked over at my spinning wheel and, instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, decided to just work on the project that was already sitting right there in front of me. (It happened to be a portion of February’s shipment, Stone Fruit — I used the coral-colored Targhee). I made a decision that I was just going to spin singles of a weight that felt comfortable for the wheel and the fiber and my hand, and that I would worry about what those singles would become later — I reasoned that if I didn’t like my yarn as a 2-ply, I could always ply it back on itself to make a 4-ply cabled yarn or ply it with another yarn or thread or fiber altogether. Or (as I discovered upon opening my May shipment, a lovely burgundy and grey Polwarth/Silk blend) I could spin another chunk of fiber and blend it in with my two plies.
I am happy to report that I now have a delightful, dense 3-ply yarn with a lot of depth… and once I spin another .5 oz of the polwarth/silk blend (and ply it with my remaining targhee singles), I believe I will also have a decent amount of yardage. Definitely enough for mitts, maybe even enough for a pair of ankle socks. And a beautiful reminder that I don’t always have to plan for every eventuality at the outset… even in spinning, there are many opportunities to change my mind in the service of a project.