Moral turpitude

There is dissension among the ranks. I swore that there was to be no casting on of projects until The Stockinette Slog has ground to its conclusion. No messing about with other yarns. No affaires des coeurs. No fondling of fibers other than those of the alpaca. The ranks disagreed with me, and after a massive insurrection, succeeded in winding a ball of yarn.
Things have gotten so bad that the yarn even made it into a bag, with the pattern neatly arranged to show the chart, needles and notions included. At that stage, however, I managed to reassert control, and have retrenched. The troops and I have recommitted ourselves to The Stockinette Slog (I know, you thought that would end with "to the asylum", didn't you? I like to keep you guessing), and refuse all further distractions.

Except maybe spinning. Spinning doesn't count as an immoral distraction, does it? Inspired by Anne, I went today for a quick lesson with a local spinner named Lila. I've felt like I've been doing all right, but there's something about operating in a feedback vacuum that I find disturbing, and I figured it would be all too easy to fool myself into learning some really really bad habits without some kind of reality check. The very nice lady whom I went to see said that, in fact, my yarn (she actually used the word "yarn", can you believe?) was looking pretty good. Practice, she said, practice; my biggest problem is that I keep letting a bit of twist into the drafting area -- in essence I'm spinning faster than I'm drafting, which results in some overtwisting of the singles. And then she skeined up my first yarn, the one I did on the turkish spindle with the lovely roving that Wanda sent (Lila said that it was balanced, can you believe? Something in my life, balanced? Who would have suspected?), and suggested that I wash it to set the twist. Here it is skeined. It really does look much more yarnlike this way, no? It turned out to be about 25 yards.
And here's what I've got on the high-whorl spindle right now.
I'm going to ball this and spin some more at about the same weight (note the way that I am fooling myself here into thinking that I have some kind of "control" over the "weight" of my "yarn". You do not need to be fooled by this; you are wiser than I.), and ply it. Then I might try to see if I can get a bit finer. I generally don't like knitting on needles much bigger than a 6 or 7; what I've got here is going to be more in the 13-15 range once plied. Bulky doesn't quite cover it.

After we played about with this a bit, she asked, all casual in that way people are sometimes, whether maybe I'd like to try a spinning wheel?

Hot damn, baby. Now that was some fun. I'm in very serious trouble. Somebody come save me before I start impulse-buying spinning wheels. See how weak the moral fiber is around here? Clearly, it needs to be spun and plied.