Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Consistency

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. - Ralph Waldo Emerson


Unless, of course, one is speaking of spinning singles, in which case it's probably a good thing. I can't seem to spin a consistent single from beginning to end to save my life. This, therefore, has become my latest quest. I tried it on a braid of fiber that I bought recently; I took a 3x5 index card, wound some of the single around it, leaving a space where I could lay my actively-being-spun single in between the sample to see how close I was. And then I never used it! Old habits die hard!

That braid, a lovely thing, is the twin of one a friend bought - we decided we are going to try to chain ply it to maintain the color changes. It is rather, um, bright, which I am finding fun and my friend apparently finds ocularly damaging - though I admit I'm not sure what I'll do with it when it's complete. 



At any rate, we bought two braids of this same colorway at a show, and made the decision to do this homework. And then we never talked about how we were going to spin it, so I believe we ended up with two rather different sets of singles - she separated the braid by color and spun all of one, then all of the next, etc., spinning from the fold (or so I gather from the various texts we've exchanged mid-spin); I just opened up the braid and started spinning. My somewhat-consistent-but-not-really singles. Which means my plied yarn, if all goes well, will contain several rainbows, albeit possibly lumpy ones. I'll let you know next week how it turned out; the Great Ply occurs this coming weekend. 



In studio news, I have sold my two extra wheels (yay!), and cleaned out and removed an extra bookcase. I am hoping to have enough stuff actually packed away or disposed of by the end of February to justify the 40+ mile trip to Ikea to shop for studio furniture. (This means cleaning out and removing two old chests of drawers, plus an old gate-leg table that's open and completely surrounded by stuff on all sides.)

And in all this cleaning I've discovered no less than 13.5 pounds of scoured-but-not-otherwise-prepped fleece. That's just the stuff that's not ready to spin, there's a lot more in various stages of usefulness. I am thinking of sending it out to be prepped, rather than doing it all myself; I have all the equipment to do it but it's pretty time-consuming and I don't (yet) have the proper setup to use the equipment I have. I just recently took down the precarious setup I had for my cradle picker; imagine a device that swings back and forth with hundreds of large, needle sharp pointy things, balanced across two cheap bar stools that wobble every time the thing swings. Yes, this thing that's so potentially damaging that I wear a leather apron and large welder's gloves when using it, it has a padlock to keep it closed when not in use, and Joe will be putting a lock on the studio door to keep the grandkids away from it. I balanced this thing on two barstools to use. I know what assumption of risk means, and I've just illustrated it for you.

We won't even go into the drum carder that's sitting on top of a stereo speaker and at a height that requires the services of a chiropractor after an hour's use of it.

I'm figuring that 13.5 pounds of (mostly Romney) wool will give me a lot of stuff to practice with to achieve my consistency. Foolish as it may be.