Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Brown, Brown, Brown...

I WISH I had something brilliant to say. But it's been a bit boring around here.
Well, not completely boring. After all,

I unexpectedly received a truly fabulous bouquet from my generous (and beautiful) cousin and auntie...


I've spun some Just For Fun yarn...


I've hung around with two of my lovely women friends and with my particularly lovely mother...

So that was all interesting to me, although it's not all that interesting to the innocent bystander, I'm sure.

I've done the mundane workaday sorts of Mom stuff and Wife stuff, as well, but that would be even less interesting to the reader. It was not particularly enthralling for me, either. There's just so much thrill one can get out of grocery shopping and paying bills (or putting them aside and fretting about them).

But lately it seems to me that I've mostly been endlessly spinning brown alpaca fleece. Brown alpaca fleece that has small bits of VM that I have to laboriously pick out of my yarn every couple inches or so. At least, I pick out the bits that get caught in the yarn. A lot of it just falls out of the fiber as I spin, so that I and the surrounding square footage end up covered in a brown snow of grot.

Vegetable matter, for those non-fiber folks amongst my readers, is what we fiber folks call the bits of grass and burrs and other stuff that ends up in fiber when the animal who used to wear it lived on the actual dirt-enhanced Earth, rather than on a fluffy pink cloud.

Not that I'd mind getting a bit of fluffy pink cloud caught up in my fiber. It would add visual interest. This fiber is pretty much uniformly brown. Not a lot of variation. It's not that it's a bad brown, or anything. But I've never been a fan of brown, and this alpaca is really determinedly set in its basic unsubtle brownness. If it wasn't for the fact that leaving the VM in would render the yarn fit only for a particularly penitent knitter bent on knitting the equivalent of a Hair Shirt, I would leave the grass and burrs in, to lend a bit of color.

In my infinite wisdom, when starting this project out I decided to continue in my largely unsuccessful attempts to learn the art of Navajo Plying. Navajo Plying gives you a 3-ply yarn (one with bumps and weird spots, if the spinner is me), which means that the yarn can be pretty darned chunky if you don't spin the original singles fairly finely. Chunky plain brown yarn is pretty useless, IMO, and the shorter length involved wouldn't give me the practice at Navajo Plying that I need in order to master the skill. So I am laboriously spinning (and picking through) a large bobbin full of miles and miles and miles of lace-weight brown.

It's taking forever. I may expire of fiber-induced ennui. And the worst thing is that I know that once I get through with that, I will then be facing miles and miles and miles of brown that needs laborious and inept plying. At which point I will have a skein of lumpy, weird, puritanical yarn that nobody in their right minds would want to actually use, much less buy.

Clearly I am driven by some psychological compulsion to continue with this dreary and seemingly endless pas de deux with the drab Willi of brown, brown, brown...


I hope it's a reflection of newly-forged virtues of Persistence and Determination or perhaps some slightly nutty form of Optimism (maybe it will turn out better than I expect?), rather than an indication of a compulsive mood disorder or creeping fiber-induced insanity.

In the meantime, I will never get on to something more interesting if I don't get on with it. You stay here to keep an eye on things. If I don't come out in a week or so, call for help.

5 comments:

Delighted Hands said...

Ha! I spin a bobbin and then do something else-also plucking out little bits that interrupts the flow of the spinning! Keep at it and it will progress soon enough!
The fun yarns are beautiful!

Dawn said...

the fun yarns are beautiful, but I like the brown too.

Jane Carlstrom said...

Well gee, dye, change it, or leave the vm and sell the yarn to someone who wants to make a ghillie suit. :D Perfect for woodland disguise. Plus the lumps will also enhance the ghillie style. You do know about ghillie suits right?
http://www.google.com/images?q=ghillie+suit&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=sfgPTOWxCIbaMfefnbMM&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CD8QsAQwAA

Nancy K. said...

I think that's a GORGEOUS shade of brown! And it's Alpaca? Good Lord, woman!

I'm actually in the process of washing and skirting about 30 Shetland fleeces. Would you like one for something different? I have lots of colors to chose from and would be pleased as punch to send one your way...

;-)

timary said...

Lol! I remember when you first started spinning and here you are spinning alpaca! BTW, a crocheter might be interested in a lumpy,weird yarn - I think those are fun in something chunky (which is pretty much what you get with crochet...) like a hat or scarf.