Making my favourite yarn

For the last while I've been obsessed knitting lace shawls, tidying up my studio and finishing up spinning projects with really slippery fibres. With more space opened up in the studio from tidying up, I was inspired to get out the tools/machines and get some wool carded to make my favourite yarn. Wool, plain and simple.

What I have below is my carding board. It's a great thing that allows me to quickly tease up the washed fibre and open up the locks. I got out some of white and some grey Romney from Acacia Farms.

I teased up some of the white wool and an equal amount of grey. The grey is quite dark so I like the effect of blending the grey with white, spinning a singles from that, and plying it with a singles of the unblended grey.

Here's what this yarn will look like: each skein below is a double ply yarn. One singles is the blended grey, and the second singles is either dark grey (the one on the left) or white (the one on the right).

Here are some drum carded nests of blended fibre. Many more followed, nearly a full pound! Will hopefully get around to spinning this up over the weekend, and then dyeing the yarn. Will keep you posted.

Goodbye to the 100-year oak

A couple of Sunday's ago, a third of the 100+ year-old oak in our front yard came crashing down. You can see from the photos that the damage was due to rot which had been going for on for quite a while. It's a huge limb and we were lucky that it missed the house, or considerable damage would have occurred. And so sadly enough, the rest of the tree had to be taken out.

And here's the stump. There's tons of wood, huge pieces of it that will need heavy machinery to move, and I'm not sure how that's going to happen. That tree provided an abundance of food for the (nasty and pesky) squirrels and the canopy provided shade. 

I'm going to miss that tree.