I love, love, love this yarn. It is soft and beautiful and slightly fuzzy and it has a gorgeous sheen- and I managed to both blend the colors through plying and retain some of that "color that glows from within" quality- but much of this doesn't show in my pictures:
This is a 14wpi 2 ply. Halcyon Fibers. I got roughly 400 yds. from 4 oz. alpaca 40%, silk 40%, merino 20%
I'm still having a hard time with the light and color in my photos though. I may have to break down and take a class or read a book about it, as intuiting the necessary things to do to fix these problems hasn't worked.
In other spinning news, I've been teaching myself a semi-woolen knitting technique- with the help of Judith Mackenzie McCuin's Teach Yourself Visually Handspinning, which I checked out from the library. It took a lot of patience to keep at it after I broke the thread for the hundredth time, but now I'm getting a consistent thread with the qualities of a woolen yarn: fuzzy. I'm using the technique that she recommends for angora rabbit, where in you allow some twist into the drafting area, but it is a forward, and not especially long, draw. I thought this would be a good way to ease myself into long draw. It's working really well for the angora/merino blend I'm using. The colors of the batt are deep and murky: dark blues and purples, with some gray and green. It has surprising bits of lilac and light blue that break up the darkness. It reminds me of tide pools on the Oregon coast on a cloudy day.
I'm still knitting. Nothing has been finished for what seems like a long time. I just downloaded Laura Chau's (that links to her blog) Flora and Fauna trio as I want to knit the Honeybee Cardi (this is a rav link) really bad. But I want to finish my stole first, and my friend is having a baby that I need to start knitting for too. If only I could spend my days knitting, instead of teaching! Not! I'm smart enough to realize that I love my knitting time precisely because it is rare.
This will have to be my Craft or Bust check-in also, because I spent all last week and part of this one avoiding technology. I'm not sure why, but I didn't check my email or read any blogs or look at Ravelry- nothing. But break's over.
2 comments:
How many times did your family have to hear you say, "Look! Look how the colors glow from within!"?
Good job on your Craft or Bust blogging. I'm chicken to take up that challenge. Teaching...yeah....
I had trouble with photo color and lighting for a long while, too — which I think perversely came partly from having taken photography classes, which meant I knew how to efficiently use a manual camera, but not how to compensate for the lack of control of a point-and-shoot. The things that helped me a lot were a) getting a tripod so I could set the point-and-shoot to "no flash" and let it take photos at slower shutter speeds, b) discovering the "photo filter" feature in Photoshop, which let me apply a cooling filter to my yellower photos, and c) finally figuring out where the friggin' "indoor" setting is on my camera, so that it can apply the cooling filter automatically.
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