Not happy, not looking forward to anything at the moment. George is in Sydney three days a week and it is getting harder amd harder to cope with things in his absence. Every single week there is a crisis of some sort while he is away that I have to deal with on my own. The kids are getting increasingly feral without him around and I feel myself turning into a fishwife as I try to control them. Then when he is here he is tired and bad-tempered and doesn't want to deal with anything. The last two weekends he has barely been at home as he runs around doing things for other people, not for us. I just want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head, permanently.
On to more cheerful things - I have started spinning again! I learnt to spin two years ago, with a series of lessons from the Guild in Melbourne, with a great teacher. I did lots of spinning throughout 2004, using some of the masses of fleece inherited from George's mother and sister who were delighted to get rid of it! Their spinning enthusiasms are over nd done with but they had a smallish flock of fleeces stored away between them! But no matter how much practice I got I still always seemed to overspin and I still can't work out how not to do it. But I had fun, and spun various skeins of yarn which I dyed in various colours and have used in scrumbling and other odd-ball stuff.
For some reason I haven't really touched the wheel this year and it has languished in a corner gathering dust. George bought me 2kg of fluff last year to turn into a jumper for him and I think I was abit afraid of trying to actually produce that much consistent yarn that wasn't overspun. But finally my fingers started itching to spin again and I dusted off the wheel last week and steeled myself to have another go.
Yesterday I plied some stuff I had spun a year ago and then forgot about. I was glad to see that I could remember how to do it without any problems! But I was horrified at just how overspun it was. When it was plied and skeined and I took it off the niddy-noddy it kinked and curled and looked just like barbed wire. It is soaking at the moment and I am about the wring it out and hang it to dry, hopefully with some weight on it. I only want to use it for crumbling anyway so it doesn't really matter.
And then I got the bags of fluff out and started spinning. It;s mostly cream wool with a small amount of alpaca and mohair, and has little flashes of colour throughout it in blue, green, yellow and red. (Are they the alpaca and mohair? I don't know). I can see it as a nice rustic jumper with some simple cabling. I;ve spun half a bobbin so far and yes, I am still overspinning. What am I doing wrong? I've even checked in a spinning book and as far as I can see I am not doing the things that cause overspinning. More practice, probably.
I attempted to teach myself to navajo ply yesterday, too. That was interesting! I had that feeling of needing three hands. I sort of got the hang of it though I doubt if the resulting yarn will be useful for anything except extreme novel effects in scrumbling. I wanted to learn this because, although I have so far spun undyed yarn and then dyed it, I am tempted by those lucious space dyed rovings I see everywhere, but don't so much like the candy-cane effect of plying that sort of stuff. (It has its place and I would do some of it like that, though). I definitely need more practice before I let myself loose on good stuff to navajo ply!
I am going to do some more spinning today because I do find it soothing, and I really, really need soothing! It is Thursday, and I still can;t a definite answer out of George about whether we are going away on Saturday for three days orfour weeks! I don't even want to go away for four weeks but he has been dithering about us all going to Sydney for two weeks while he works there. We did this three years ago and it was all right, though very exhausting for me because he was of course working for sixteen hours a day and I had to amuse the kids in a strange city on my own. (Not that Sydney is strange, as such! Just that I have an appalling sense of direction and find unfamiliar places hard work). And now he has turned his phone off so that I can;t ring him and complain that he never talks to me!!
Not only do I want Christmas to be over and done with, I think I want everything to be over and done with.
We haven;t wrapped his presents yet - at this rate they won't get wrapped as I am feeling unChristmassy towards him in a big way!
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