spinning and a few rambles...

This is how my package of Art Roving looked when I opened it. Isn't it lovely! I had to take a photo right away. You can see the painting that inspired the colors. The roving is a Blue Face Leicester fiber and is a dream to spin. I believe I 'overthought' the spinning and split the roving into too many pieces to get a strong stripe of each color. Instead, as the next photo shows I got more of a blending of all the colors with a few areas of solid color. The proof will be in the knitting. BTW the bright roving on the right of the photo above is a superwash merino and Seacell blend that is so silky and lovely to spin. I have the skein hanging to dry otherwise I would add a photo of it too.

This photo shows how marvelously the artiste captured the feeling of the painting in her colors. I was able to get almost five hundred yards from the four ounces of roving, which is a first for me. I wanted to get more of a lace weight and I am getting closer. Each skein teaches me more. It seems to be how I learn: try something. Try something again. Ahh.. that is why that happens. What would happen if...? And then I read everything I can get my hands on to see what I can learn and how I can improve. When I have such lovely fibers to work with the learning process is just pure joy. I wonder what an ordinary housewife who had to do her own spinning hundreds of years ago would think of the fibers available today. Probably think she was in hog heaven!

I threw this old photo in for fun. This motley crew includes mother, grandmother, siblings and a friend who seems to have an enormous crush on my older brother, not unusual. It was many years before I came to realize this wasn't really our castle. We were living in Madrid, Spain at the time and our parents would bring us out to this lovely spot, a, for all practical purposes, abandoned castle. We had the run of the place. All four towers were accessible, even the dungeons, complete with chains, too tempting for the boys. Oh, but what fun!! Can you imagine the effect having such a playground had on an impressionable young girl? I will leave you to it. The castle is now a tapestry museum and certain parts of the castle are now closed off to the public, but for four years it was ours! For those who love to travel this is the castle at Manzanares El Real, about thirty kilometers outside of Madrid and makes an interesting side trip on your way to Segovia.

Until next time.