Week by week

That's the only way to go right now, it seems: week by week. 

Last week brought Younger Daughter's school's spring concert.  This year they tried something different and did a musical - Seussical, actually (or, to be precise, Seussical Lite; this makes sense, as they make a point of including even the very very little kids in the spring concert).  Younger Daughter was a Bird Girl.

She had a blast, which is the most important thing.  And she was particularly excited this year, since Rick's parents came out to see her musical!  Audience composition is important.

The first spinning class went well last week (I think).  By the end of the class, all of the students were making yarn using the park and draft method.  And one of them had even progressed to trying to draft while the spindle was dangling and spinning; she did pretty darned well, even if she did learn first-hand one of the reasons why the name 'drop spindle' makes so much sense.  We're meeting again tonight for the second half of the class, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how everyone did over the week.

The goal of tonight's class is to learn about plying.  To that end, I decided to show them several different possibilities for plying spindle-spun yarn.

What you see there on the left is two knitting needles with cops (I slid the cops from the spindle shaft onto the knitting needle), ready for plying.  Between them is a ball wound with two plies at the same time, all ready to go (it's wound around a rock, to make starting the ball easier).  And on the right is a center-pull ball, ready for plying from both ends.  In class, I will teach them Andean plying using their spindles full of yarn (and the one that I need to go spin right now).  That should give them four reasonable ways to spin, two of which are limited to making two ply (or cable-plied) yarns, and the other two of which can be used for more than two plies, if desired. 

All of the spindle time (every bit of that yarn was spun between last week's class and last night, on top of all of the usual stuff that goes along with having out-of-town visitors - we went to the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA, btw, and if you like Tim Burton and live within reach, it's a pretty nifty thing to see! - preparing for Younger Daughter's birthday yesterday, and for Rick's birthday and Father's Day this weekend) means that my poor wheel has been banished to a corner.

It sits there, with the second half of my lovely fiber waiting to be spun and plied (and glowing beautifully in the errand sun - it hasn't gotten much above the mid to high 60s around here lately, with lots of June Gloom in evidence; sun?  we don't need no stinking sun!).  Soon, my precious, soon.