A week ago a lovely new spinning wheel arrived on my doorstep: my Watson Marie wheel (with beautiful Victoria trim). The wheel is American black walnut with accents of purple heart and blackwood and was handcrafted flawlessly by Andrew Watson from Burlington, Ontario, Canada. His work is awesome, indeed! Needless to say, I have been doing a lot of spinning getting to know my new wheel.
In between spinning, I have also been doing a lot of dyeing the past couple weeks, trying to get my inventory of hand painted fibers up to snuff and posted on Etsy. The past few weeks, Blueface Leicester has been my fiber of choice. Next up is a Polwarth wool/mohair/silk blend. And then more merino/yak/silk and merino/bombyx silk. When I get in a dyeing mode, I just need to go with it. But the nice thing about pumping up my inventory is that I have this colorful array of fibers in front of me, and it just makes me want to spin different colorways and ply them, which is what I have been doing every evening.
This skein is 346 yards (4.0 oz.). I plied one of my new colorways "Tanager" (100% BFL) with a blend of BFL/tussah silk in my "River Dart" colorway. I spun this on my new Marie.
This next skein was spun on my Rose wheel. I plied a merino/yak/silk blend ("Palm Canyon" colorway) with a BFL/tussah silk blend in my "Seychelles" colorway. 308 yards, 3.7 oz.
This is the first skein I spun on my new Marie wheel. I plied one of my BFL rovings in my "Bristol Bay" colorway with a BFL/tussah silk roving from Blarney Yarn (my friend, Miryha) in her colorway "Evergreen". 292 yards, 4.1 oz.
On another note. I had an email from my friend, Debra Sposa, who teaches art at Whitney High School in Cerritos. She is one of the most amazing teachers I know and has been so fortunate to teach at a school that values art. Inspired by a number of her artist friends, and after a class with India Flint three summers ago, Debra assigned her students a project using quilting, eco dyeing, stitching, appliqué. The work of her students is extraordinary and can be viewed at her blog here: http://www.artisun.blogspot.com What lucky students they are to have an inspirational teacher like Debra.
So back to dyeing and spinning, and spinning and dyeing . . . .
