The Heathen Housewife

Hey, everyone – I’ve got another completed spinning project. I love this new yarn. It is so soft and pretty, pretty pretty. It is so very fun and relaxing to sit and spin for an hour or so, I hardly even know how this pound and a half of fiber turned into yarn in what felt like the blink of an eye.

This is that Blue Faced Leicester wool from Crown Mountain Farms I was telling you about earlier this month. It’s their Avalon colorway, and the color in the photo on their webpage is a little more accurate than my flash-lit photos. I’ve got 1298 yards of worsted weight 3-ply. I so totally want to toss aside every one of the very many (more than you know about!) projects currently on my plate and cast on a swatch immediately.

But here’s the surprise. Are you ready? I’m not going to. But that’s not the real surprise for you. Oh, no. I’ve made a decision about some of my handspun yarns. I’ve been having so much fun making yarn that I have a surplus of handspun yarn at this point. So I’m going to offer this batch to you, my loyal readers. I paid $69.00 for the roving to make this yarn, before shipping costs. I think I deserve a tiny amount of compensation for the hours I spent making 3894 yards of singles, then plying them all together, as much fun as I had during those hours. So I’m going to offer it for sale at just twice what I paid for the roving. This yarn can be yours for just $138 plus shipping. Any takers? If not, I’ll hold on to it and eventually get around to knitting it up into a beautiful sweater for me.

But that is not all…This luscious yarn from last month is also still sitting on my shelf. There are 766 yards and 204 grams of Merino 2-ply squish here. It would make a very generous scarf, or a nice chunky lace shawl, or even a child’s sweater. It ranges mostly between sport and worsted weight, but it does have a lovely rustic handspum character with a few blobs of bigger and a few stretches of smaller.

The true colors are closer to the second picture than the first, but really somewhere in between.

I paid $35.50 for this roving, and would be happy to sell the yarn for $70 plus shipping.

And hold on to your seats, friends, that is not all! I’m pretty proud of this pile o’yarn. It’s 1188 yards/ 111 g of remarkably consistent lace weight 100% silk.

I made it out of Tussah silk top from Blackberry Ridge Woolen Mill, and I love this stuff. If I end up keeping this one, I’m going to make myself another shawl out of it – probably something from Knitted Lace of Estonia. I paid only about 33 dollars for this roving, but cripes, people! It’s teeny tiny lace yarn and there’s a lot of yardage here. You can have it for just $66 plus shipping. I was going to say more, but I started writing this post intending to ask double my materials for each of these yarns, and I’m going to stick to it.

Hello, here’s some more violet semi-goodness. This is 80% merino 20% nylon 3-ply fingering weight. There are a total of 110 grams and 594 yards between the two skeins.

I was practicing chain-plying on this batch, and I did a great job on most of it, but there is one section that looks like it’s been smoking crack. See?

Even so, I think there’s plenty of non-crack-smokin’ yarn here to set you up with a nice pair of socks. Or a lacy scarf or small shawl. I paid somewhere around $20 for the roving, and you can have the yarn for $30 plus shipping.

And finally, I don’t have a picture of the last yarn. It’s the leftover yarn from these socks.

It’s spindle-spun three-ply superwash merino from Blue Moon Fiber Arts Sheep to Shoe kit. There are 578 yards left, plenty to get another generous pair of socks from. It’s tightly spun, and on the light side of fingering weight. It’s quite consistent, and the socks I made from it are lovely to wear. Thirty bucks, plus shipping.

It feels totally crazy to be *selling* my handspun yarn. I’ve got lots of very good reasons to do it, though. The main one is that I feel I’m on the teetering edge between conscientious stashing and wild hoarding of yarn, fiber, and related tools and materials. I know that all of these yarns are ones I could make again, and the fibers are pretty much ones I could buy again. I would love to knit up any and all of them, but there are a bunch of commercial yarns in my closet begging to be dealt with, as well two sweaters’ worth of my other handspun yarn. I would love to see someone buy some of this yarn and knit it up so that I can feel the thrill of it coming to fruition sooner than if I were to save it for myself.

Also, I’m planning a big fiber-related purchase in the near future. Actually, I’ve put down a significant deposit on it already and will be collecting the item and paying the rest of the money during Shepherd’s Harvest over Mothers’ Day weekend. That sounds like a long way off, but the time is going to fly. I have the cash in my fun-money checking account right now, but just enough and I’d like to keep enough liquid cash available to indulge in additional fiber finds and all the kettle corn I can eat while I’m there as well. Not to mention that I’m trying to save for a fiber-related vacation later in the year. So….

If you’re interested in any of these yarns, e-mail me at shellyk@shellykang.com. It’ll be first-come first-serve, and I’ll respond back to you with a shipping amount and total, which you can pay via Paypal. I’m choosing not to list these on etsy because I’d rather not pay them a cut if I can keep this among friends. I know you all know I’m trustworthy.

Alrighty, then. Next time, a full report on my finished Bacchus Socks.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 3:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.