The final product!

After assessing the amount of yarn I had, I determined that I did not have enough to make a scarf, which was my original plan. Spinning yarn takes a very long time, and creating enough for a large garment would be pretty difficult for a beginner. I have so much respect for the people of the past who made all of their clothes by spinning yarn and thread.

I decided to make a neck warmer, serving the same purpose as a scarf, with less excess fabric.

This is a picture of me knitting the neck warmer. I have been knitting for a few years, but for this project I used a stitch I had never tried before, and I really like how it turned out.

And here is my final product! Unfortunately the colors are washed out in these pictures.

Obviously, the current weather does not require any such garment, but I am very excited to use my neck warmer next year in the mountains when I'm attending Appalachian!

Today we dye

After spinning and plying all of the fiber, it was time for my favorite part of the entire process, dyeing the yarn! We decided to use a technique using....................

Kool-Aid!!

Tropical Punch and Cherry to be specific.

First I mixed the two Kool-aid packs with water and placed the undyed yarn in the pot, then heated it to almost boiling. The next step was to turn the burner off, cover the pot and let it sit for 30 minutes while all of the fibers soaked up the dye.

Unfortunately I have no good pictures of the ball of dyed yarn, but when I post the pictures of the knitting process you will be able to see how it turned out!

Plying

I sucessfully spun a fair amount of yarn out of the angora roving. The next step was to ply. Plying involves spinning at least 2 strands of yarn together to make the yarn thicker and balance it out. This is a picture of two single strands about to be plyed together.

When you ply you take the two strands, attach them to the spindle and twist in the direction opposite that the yarn was spun in. If you plyed them the same direction they were spun in the entire thing would come unraveled, and it would be a very sad day, because spinning takes a long time. This next picture shows my lovely mentor and myself plying the yarn. It is easy to get the two strands tangled when plying so it helps to have someone hold them.

Here is a blurry picture of my beautiful plyed yarn!

A few pictures

All of these picture were from the second meeting with my mentor. She handed me a spindle and we basically jumped in on the yarn making process.
This is the softest stuff in the entire world, angora (which is rabbit fur) roving. Roving is the clean pre-spun fiber. Before spinning, you have to "draft", that is where you basically loosen up the fibers by pulling it gently. This makes it much easier to spin. This is me attempting to spin for the very first time. The fiber in this picture is pure wool. I didn't have a before picture of the roving, but it looks very similar the angora in the picture above, but much less soft. Here is an upclose shot of my spindle and a small amount of yarn!