Familiar colorways I always seem to go for. I’ve got about 400g of the terracotta blend ( the blending notes are posted here ) and about 650g of the greyish rusty tweed. My goal is to be spinning and knitting the handspun as I did with rescued From oblivion, but I have decided for now to bear down and get a lot of spinning done first, so then I’ll have a lot to choose from when it comes time for knitting. It has been a dream of mine for a long time, to spin samples of my designs from my own handspun, after all, I include gauge substitution charts in nearly all of my patterns just for this reason.

I should have made *Spinning Notes* on this entry, but honestly, I have been focused on one thing, and one thing only, and that is to learn to properly spin “fat singles”. Since watching Jillian Moreno’s LongThread video Spinning Singles , which I highly recommend, I just decided it was one of those things I wanted to challenge myself with, because some of the best yarn I’ve knit with, like Donegal Aran Tweed, with a texture of handspun, loaded with rich layers of colors hidden in the twist, is just what I am striving to create. I have a ways to go yet, but I’ll get there.

But from now until forever I will be leaving off the add-ins of pre-felted nepps in the blending. I think the best tweed blends which have nepp textures are not from the adding them into the blend as much as from the addition of colorful shorter fibers, snips of combed top or even cutting yarn and carding it a little first, but I’m getting rid of all the wool nepps I bought; they are a hazard to drains, and caused me a lot of grief in the spinning. Oh, and after spinning a couple of pounds of yarn almost entirely on my e-spinner, I found the take-up needed to be so great that it was putting definite strain on the motor. So I switched the operation on over to the trusty traditional wheel, and the control was easy, almost like a sigh of relief! I am finding that for Fat Singles, my Ashford Traditional is the tool of choice.