Prairie Daisies: yarn

In my post a few days ago, I showed you the lazy kate with bobbins ready for plying. Here's the result:

I thought it was actually a little harder to use than the built-in lazy kate on the wheel. It could just be that I'm new at it and need more practice. I had one bobbin on the top and one on the bottom. It might have been better if both bobbins had been on the bottom at the same level. It seemed as though sometimes they didn't quite turn exactly together.

I really like the colors in this yarn.

It was a Falkland wool dyed roving I bought from Fat Cat Knits on Etsy. There were about 140 yards as I wound it off the bobbin onto the niddy noddy. Of course, it will shrink up a fair amount when the twist is set. It should be listed in the shop soon! :)

Just kind of a mixture of things to talk about today. First off, I baked bread one day last week. It's been quite awhile since I made any. I've tried several different recipes and lots of different techniques trying to improve my bread-baking skills. This one turned out okay, though it was a little sweet for my taste (for bread anyway). It would probably make good cinnamon rolls. I found the recipe at allrecipes.com. This one was different for me in that it used oil instead of margarine or butter. It also used water for the liquid instead of milk as in some recipes, making it a lower fat and lower cholesterol choice.

On another subject, the banty hens have started laying. My husband found the first eggs the other day. They were so cute, I thought I'd show you a picture of them. Here are two of them in front of a regular sized egg.

And now we'll finally get around to yarn and fiber. I carded up some fiber to spin a fun yarn a few days ago. Usually I'm very specific about where I put the colors when I'm painting roving for yarn. I try to get things all matched up and color sections even, etc. I've been reading about people putting all sorts of things into their carded batts, so I thought I'd try it just for fun. I dug out a bunch of fiber and yarn stash, along with some white Merino and started carding with wild abandon. I put in different kinds of fiber...some alpaca and mohair, Corriedale and Coopworth wools, Lincoln locks, and even some bits of yarn (though they were kind of difficult to get through the carder). Here's the yarn I spun from the batt:

I really liked how it turned out, even with the undyed Merino. There were little bits of different colors and textures here and there, making for lots of surprises. So after that little experiment, I decided to do up a bunch of different colors to use instead of just using the white wool as a base. I dyed up small bits of BFL wool into 16 different colors.