[note: this post is image intensive]

I have no idea how it all started. . . well, that’s not really true … it started with 4 oz of hand painted Merino roving.

There are two blogs that I read where the bloggers spin amongst their other creative endeavors, (here and here) but I never really connected with the content or even really understood it.

But after this roving was sitting with my yarn stash for a couple of months, I started to wonder what I was going to do with it. Thus began my research into spinning – and it was purely information gathering.

I bought books:

These books were ok but I wasn’t all that impressed by them, however the book I found most thorough and helpful was:

I found a few sites ( like The Joy of Handspinning and ICanSpin.com) and even saw a couple of spindles that caught my eye… but how did I know if I would like this? So spending $20-40 bucks on a spindle was not what I wanted so I bought a beginner top whorl spindle on etsy.

And to make a long story short …

I also bought:

1. a 1 yard niddy noddy on etsy
2. a 3 oz wool sampler from an etsy seller and
3. 8 oz of dyed Corriedale wool from hello yarn.

My spindle arrived on Saturday, March 10. I pre-drafted as best I knew how and spun a couple of .5 oz singles from the wool sampler (using the park and draft method). I went to bed thinking … ‘what’s the big deal’ … the next day, I plied. I must admit that was cool. And here are the other two mini skeins from the wools sampler:

Next I spun and plied the corridale:

So, despite some allergy issues, I ended up with about 35 yards of very bulky corridale yarn. Any ideas on what I can make with it?