Mein Shotzee

The Shotzee spindle has arrived. It is a medium weight, cherry wood tool of beauty. I like the way it spins. I do believe I'm more comfortable with a top whorl spindle. But I'm going to keep working with the Louet. I've separated the shetland top into two, 4 oz. bundles and will spin each with the 2 new spindles. I love the color of this shetland too!

And speaking of color... I found this lovely skein of wool purchased at the Earth Guild in Asheville, NC about 2 years or so ago. I was having a hard time deciding what color to dye it. But I've decided to dye it red, inspired by the book I've just finished reading, The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman. I don't want to give anything away in case you want to read the book, but at the end of the story we find one of the characters is a spinner and knitter who dyes all her wool with madder root, producing red yarn. So I thought by George! Red! However, I didn't use madder root. I did something I've been wanting to try for a long time... Kool Aid! Cherry red. I used the directions from the Knitty website found here.

And here it is. The dye job came out a little uneven. When I do this again, I will bring the dye and water level up to where I think it will cover the wool before I add the wool and I will stir it more often than the instructions say. But otherwise I was happy with the color and the process. Just the fact that I wasn't dealing with toxic materials made me pretty happy.

About 3 years ago, I visited a really cool little yarn shop in Lancaster, PA called Oh Susanna's. If a yarn shop could be on an episode of Hoarders, this would be the place. There were shelves and baskets and boxes full of yarn. So much that you just wanted to jump in and swim around like a pile of leaves in autumn. And out of all that yarn, I bought one little skein of lace weight tweed yarn. Yes, just one. I am a doofus. So while straightening up in the loom room the other day, I came across my little green ball and decided to finally do something with it. Since it's lace weight, and since I saw a really cute narrow scarf in a magazine the other day, I'm thinking scarf. Mostly too because it is just one little ball. If it turns out I don't have enough for a scarf, then it will be a cowl.

Want to share this website... it's really cool! And fun. House of Tartan Interactive Weaver