My mum’s been longing to visit Jaggerspun mill for years. She really loves their sock yarn, though it was their alpaca silk blend we met first, as a weaving yarn. I finally made the trek to their store (though mom wasn’t able to come along). I ended up walking out with two large boxes of fiber, most in plain white for her to dye, but also some fun colors for me to play with. These bright colors called me first-it’s their Kokadjo, a 4-ply fingering weight yarn thats a blend of 90% superwash treated wool and 10% silk. I picked out the variegated and dark purple for my first pair, not paying much attention to how much yarn was on each spool. Turns out that there wasn’t quite enough of the variegated yarn, so for the last bit of the sock before the toe I supplemented with the purple, doing helical knitting to alternate a row of the variegated and a row of the purple. I think I got away with it! I actually really like the effect of the combined variegated and purple section, but I wouldn’t have had enough of the purple to do the whole sock that way. As it is the second cone of purple is running low!
In retrospect maybe I should have weighed the amount of yarn on each cone first, and come up with a more comprehensive plan, but it was kind of fun trying to decide what to do on the fly. I’m hoping to get two more pairs of socks from this yarn, with some supplemental black as contrasting yarn.
In the background of the sock pictures, you can see my new spinning wheel! I’ve been using it mostly for decoration, but every once in a while I’ll go spin a bit on it. It’s a great wheel, or walking wheel, made by Lyle Wheeler. My wheel is the one he shows on his website! As for my other wheels… I have a double drive ashford traditional (currently living with my parents) that we bought new for me, as my very first spinning wheel. My second wheel is also an Ashford traditional (single drive), at least we think it is, bought on Ebay for cheap because it was missing the flyer assembly. This allowed us to instal the super-duper high speed ashford flyer kit, which has a ridiculously high ratio. Because of that ratio, this is my go to wheel for most of my spinning. I’ve had both of my ashfords for a long time, and they went to college and grad school with me. The next additions were a small electric EEW wheel from Dreaming Robots and a Country Craftsman, that is my go to plying wheel, in part because it has lovely large bobbins. This great wheel is my most recent acquisition, and I think it rounds out the family nicely.