Fiber and Faucets

Saturday, we went to a little fiber festival in Mason, MI, featuring fiber from four different local farms. I purchased about 12 oz of wool roving for spinning, shown above. The green is hand dyed Romney, and the brown is natural-colored Blue Faced Leicester from a sheep named Snickers. I believe it will match the handspun I made Scott a hat from a few years ago.

Mason is just a few miles south of Lansing, so we spent the rest of the day with a couple of friends who live there. We saw the house Bones bought earlier this year, and then went out for sushi, followed by a trip to the MSU dairy store, where we bought some interesting hard cheeses to try and ate some ice cream.



Sunday, Scott installed a new goose neck faucet in our kitchen. I am very exited about it because I can now get our big soup and canning pots under the faucet to fill them properly, plus it's much more attractive. Unfortunately, getting the old faucet out was a major ordeal. The shut-off valves under the sink were not functional, and once we turned the water off, they were stuck so hard on there that Scott was forced to cut them off with a hacksaw. He also struggled to unbolt the existing faucet from the sink, even with the help of penetrating oil. All of this unforeseen trouble led to several trips to the hardware store. Eventually, the faucet came off, and all of the new fittings and fixtures went in like a breeze. The pretty, new faucet is working great.



Inspired by our trip to the fiber fair, I spent a lot of Sunday spinning and plying the yarn pictured above. Sadly, my photography skills are a bit lacking, and the skein appears a bit washed out, but on the whole it is much more washed out than the original fiber was. I think I regret my choice to divide it into three sections and ply them together for a marled yarn. The result was a subtly variegated sage green yarn with an overall feel like an elven cloak from Lothlorien. My sections weren't quite even, so once I ran out of the first single, I navajo plied the remaining yarn. You can see the resulting small skein sitting on the table in front of the main skein. The difference is marked between the contrasts in this skein and the blends of the other. In retrospect, navajo plying all of the yarn would have created an effect that would have made the yarn better resemble the roving. I am not entirely sure what made this not as successful as other marled yarns I have made in the past, but I suspect it was a combination of the width of the roving and the length of the color sections. This has certainly been a lesson in controlling color results from my spinning.

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