Spindle spinning cormo

I had intended to write this blog post over the weekend, but yet again life went a tiny bit pear-shaped. I did a quick log on to Facebook before I started on Saturday, only to find that my top feed was a message to the world from my niece that just said baldly "Hospitalised!". Needless to say, part of the world at least was going not so quietly bananas. As I know that her mother makes the horned fingers sign at any mention of Facebook, I rang her to gently ask if she had heard anything, and the remainder of the evening passed with multiple phonecalls and exchanges of information.

Anyway, my niece is ok-ish and at home. She will have to have surgery in the next couple of weeks, but it is a relatively common and very treatable condition, so we don't need to get too anxious. Yesterday was spent with a briefish but nice knitting meet-up and then P and I went on to see the invalid.

OK, to my subject. I decided to have a brief change from wheel spinning and to sample my beautiful moorit (if you can call it that, but it is just that colour) cormo that I got from Beth Smith at The Spinning Loft. I had washed a little bit of it previously, so I rounded up my Forsyth mini-combs and a suitable spindle and got going.



(I rather fear that these photos are all going to be a bit blurred, my camera is playing up somewhat. But you will get the gist.)



The lock structure looked to have been a bit disturbed by my less than perfect washing, but in fact, the fleece is so nice that it was quite easy to sort of reconstruct it. The tips still appeared to be a little matted and possibly dry, but again, not so bad. very little detritus, and it combed out quite well.



I didn't diz off the fibre - my one complaint about the Forsyth combs is that you can't easily clamp them, but I don't use mini-combs often enough to justify replacing them with a pair than can be fixed. So I just gently pull off the roving with my hand, and reorganise it if I have to afterwards.

After I had made a few little coils, I started spinning.



Really, really nice fibre to spin - I was getting a very fine and even thread. I think that I will probably spindle spin the whole lot - we have a week in Cornwall coming up, and this will make a good project.

And yes - the spindle is pretty special!



I had been lusting after this one on the Golding website for ages, and fortunately they had one at SOAR. So it was one of the ones that came home with me.

Other than that, Falkland has given way to oatmeal BFL on the Sidekick, and it is coming out very nicely. Again to be overdyed, but that won't happen for ages. I have a lot of oatmeal BFL and BFL and silk to spin up!

It is very soothing.

And other than that, someone needs to stop it raining, or something very nasty will happen perpetrated by moi. Which reminds me for litle good reason of last night's "Sherlock", The Hounds of Baskerville, which I thought was brilliant!

But at lest the foul weather is driving me to do a bit of much needed housework. Pine needles everywhere.