Yarn Diet

Yesterday in class someone mentioned they knew a person who put herself on a yarn diet and that the dieter had lost about 200 pounds of yarn!  I like the idea of cutting back on a stash as a diet and want to tell you about my own yarn diet of 2015.

In March of this year I gorged on yarn in Portland at the Rose City Yarn Crawl.  There were skeins and skeins of yarn on sale far too many of which I had to own.  (Read more about that adventure here and here.)  I was embarrassed enough about the amount of yarn purchased I chose not to show it on the blog.  When I started to put that yarn indulgence away in my stash I found the cubes in my bookshelf stash container were overflowing.  You know that feeling when nothing fits anymore and you either have to lose weight or admit it is time to move to the next size.  Well, my stash takes up all the space I have in my office so it was time for a strict yarn diet.

And I have to say from March through September I was good, in fact very good.  Ok perhaps a skein or two was allowed, but only if it were to be used on something in process.  And then the spinning class started and things changed.

Now it isn´t that I am actually purchasing yarn, but I need to buy roving.   Roving is the long and rather narrow bundles of fiber prepared in such a way it is ready to spin.  Here´s another look at my Stormy Night roving (this was given to us in class).

An example of roving

A spinner takes fiber directly from the roving and attaches it to the wheel.  If you don´t have roving available you don´t spin, but I need to spin to learn.  Therefore I had to purchase roving.  Now to my credit except for the pound of natural brown Shetland roving I purchased, every other roving has been spun.  And what is the end product of spinning?  Well yes, it is yarn.

To add to the roving accumulation, last week Tena and I ventured to Abbotsford to visit Birkeland Brothers Wool.   It is a local wool business that has been around since 1939 and it owns one of the oldest carding machines in the region.   This store focuses on roving and selling spinning wheels, so it was a great trip for me and my interests.  Tena was a good sport to come along as company for the approximate one hour drive each way.  I did test drive a type of wheel that I actually liked very much, but the big purchase of the day was roving.

Perendale roving

Perendale is a breed of sheep that produces both good meat and good wool for spinning.   This roving is particularly soft and affordable.  Tena said I had to make something that will get close to my face as the blue matches my eyes.  Since there are 100 gm or about .22 lb of roving, I should be able to create quite a nice scarf out of it.  (Obviously this roving has been dyed.)

Yak and Camel roving

The 50% Yak and 50% Camel just screamed at me.  I like exotic (OK you might say weird) fibers.  The possum yarn still lingers in my memory.  At any rate there is only 25 gm or .9 oz of this roving.  Both fibers are collected from the animals without shearing.  The yak fiber is removed by a processed referred to as rooing (by hand).  Here´s a 2-minute video showing how this is done.  The camel fiber is shed or molted.  Both fibers are combined into a very soft roving.  This will be spun into something special.  At the moment I have a vague idea about what it needs to become.  More will be shared about it as the idea develops.

So the yarn diet of 2015 is being busted.  It seems as if a few extra special yarns are sneaking into the stash, but I think these few extra grams/pounds of wool will be good for my overall creative well being.