Home & Spinning

So you might be asking, did I mean homespinning? Nope, I mean home (we're buying a house!!!) and spinning (Spinning week Oct 4-10th all over, but spinning month for us Coloradians). Been doing more regarding buying a house than on the spinning side, but have gotten a bit of spinning love in.

First, the house: we are now under contract for a lovely 3bd, 3 bath house in the westminster/broomfield area. If all goes well (fingers crossed!) we will be homeowners by Nov 13th, which is very cool and scary all at once. Especially due to the bellyflops going on with everyone's finances now. Really, who can say their job is 100% secure, no matter who they are. And as Kyle works for a company tied to the financial sector, it does makes things potentially a bit more interesting. All part and parcel of why we went for the pricing range and house size that we did. We easily could have gotten a loan for more $$$, for a bigger house, buy why? So far, it's just the two of us (well, for now at least), and we both wanted to ensure that if for some horrid, unknown reason one of us lost our job, we could still make the mortgage payment and other bills. Granted, it'd be tight with no extra for fun stuff (like beer and yarn), but totally doable. Sometimes I think it pays to be very practical, even though I am often teased for it at work. Okay, okay, but besides financial reasons, we both do love the house we picked, plus the lovely deck and backyard. Barley will certainly have fun there. :)

Now as to the spinning, I've been working hard at not overtwisting some of my yarns when I spin, so I get a lofty endproduct. On my other wheelspuns, the yarns turn out a bit too tightly spun, and even with a generous plytwist and thwacking during finishing, they don't really relax to give a nice knitting hand. True, I spin worsted, so that decreases the loft factor, but these are way beyond that. So lately I've taken to spinning on the lowest ratio for my wheel, even for fairly fine (approx 24-30 wpi) singles. Seems to give me the lofty yarn I'm looking for, but makes me wonder if I don't have something set-up wrong? Well, hoping the Spinning class with Maggie at Shuttles will help me figure this out more.


**From top left, cwise 1) handspun, handdyed cumulonimbus 2)Autumn Sunset handdyed BFL top 3) Pansies handdyed 2ply fingering wt wool 4) Forest handdyed lcwt 2ply wool

Otherwise been working on knitting a few things (all gifts, shh!), but the lovely Kristi brought me back some lovely alpaca roving from the Taos Wool festival, so hopefully once done with current project, I can try my hand at it. So soft! Otherwise, also got a bit of dyeing done, also looking forward to knitting/spinning. Way too many projects and not enough time!