Spinning - On the Wheel

I've been doing some spinning lately after a break where I got a lot of crochet charity blankets done. I bought some multi-colored Jacob roving from a friend and this is the color of the water after I washed the spun yarn!! This was from roving!! I always thought that roving was clean but have learnt otherwise. The color of the yarn is quite different to the color of the roving now the dirt is all gone.

This water is a similar color to the water when I wash fleece and very unexpected considering roving is cleaned when it's made from the fleece into the roving.

This is the actual yarn from the Jacob, it's just lovely and the photo really doesn't do it justice. It was amazing how much softer the yarn was after all that dirt was washed out too!

Here's some odds and ends that were on my Country Spinner. You can see the yarn at the very left, that's the above Jacob yarn, see how different it was before washing?

The next one along, the brown one is some Bond roving that I bought at the Bendigo Sheep and Wool Show in 2008. It was a lovely spin. The next one is some Wensley/Teeswater Hand-dyed (not by me) and the last one, the blue/purple, is some roving I bought at Spotlight that's actually meant for felting. I just loved the colors so much that I bought it for spinning!!

This week I've done some dyeing but I haven't downloaded the pics yet. I'm using up my stash as much as possible this year and trying reeeeeally hard NOT to buy more fleece/roving/yarn until my current stash is under control.

I've used up at least 12 tubs of yarn on the charity blankets, and recently I spun up two full tubs of a lovely crossbred fleece. I've almost finished washing a couple of kilos of white fleece too, that will be the next one I'll spin.

Anyway back to the dyeing.... I played around with some food dyes again and am very pleased with the results, I have some nice effects over some white rovings and am looking forward to spinning them up. I'll take some pics tomorrow in the daylight.