Here’s what I got up to, last weekend at Camp Pluckyfluff Chicago:

These are some of my favorites:

Crazy-carded wool (and whatever else jumped into the batt) plied on a blue thread. Called this colorway South Seas.

This was me going a little bit crazy with the glitz. I like how it turned out though!

I really like this one. It’s a bog-standard sportweight-ish white wool singles plied on a silver metallic thread, with spirals, beehives, and beads in the ply. It turned out really gorgeous, which is nice because I felt like such a bore, showing up to Camp Pluckyfluff — i.e., The Land of Color and Texture and Basically Everything that Plain White Wool is the Enemy Of — with a bobbin of plain white singles, but that’s what I had on hand and I hadn’t really had time to spin a full bobbin of anything more interesting before the class.

This is Mohairy! This was a fun technique to learn. Basically you card a batt of mohair as fluffy and cloudlike as you can possibly get it, then you ply it around a core yarn and let it sort of cling lightly, and you get this fuzzy translucent effect where your core yarn shows through. I used white mohair with a little white and blue glitz in it, around a core of leftover blue/purple handdyed sock yarn. I may be biased but I think it turned out gorgeous.

This one was fun to make. We blended felted bobbles in with the roving as we were spinning it, and then I plied it with another crazy carded singles. I had to seriously assert myself over my bobbin tension to force the bobbles to feed through the orifice and over the hooks onto the bobbin, but it was worth it, I think. This is a fun yarn.

There are some others, all up there on flickr if you want to see them. I had such a blast at class. I had my doubts about whether or not I should sign up for it, since I’m not much for knitting with novelty yarn and I like my spun yarns to be things I can think of things to make out of them, but it was just sooooo frigging much fun to just sort of fly by the seat of my pants and see what I came up with. I will definitely be reusing several of the techniques in the future too, as I have been trying to figure out spiral plying for a little bit and hadn’t quite figured it out (I had the thick and thin singles bit, but I hadn’t figured out the tension, and as a result, the one skein of yarn I produced trying to do the spiral thing is really kind of wonky), and I love the gentle beads and beehives, and mohairy. I might even go so far as to try and blend glass beads in, if I’m wild and crazy! Who knows! Anything is possible!

In fact, the only real drawback of the class was…….*whispers* itreallymademewantanewspinningwheel. *whine* I might sell my Louet. I hardly ever use it; we don’t get along well. Mostly I just use my babe anyways. I love my babe, I don’t think I would sell it. But that folding Lendrum Complete with the whole shebang, all the standard and high-speed and plying flyers in one tempting package… and it folds up so I could tuck it away in a small spot in my apartment instead of having it constantly take up a big chunk of space like the Louet or the Babe… sooo tempting. Unfortunately, also soooo $622 (before you start adding accessories). But a girl can dream. (And a girl can plot, and she can save her pennies like she did for her drum carder. And a girl might as well wait anyways, since she has no free time thanks to this stupid idea to go back to school, which, speaking of, best get off to doing my homework as sadly it will not write itself.)