A Day Without Knitting?

Well, not quite, but I did more weaving and spinning than knitting.

I put a new warp on the loom a couple of days ago, and wove a few mugrugs, but I decided this morning that I'm tired of weaving with this thick stuff:

On the sofa beside me as I did a tiny bit of knitting was the remains of a warp that came off my little loom - probably three dozen threads. I decided to use them all together as weft, and got one mugrug from it:

Terrible picture, but it's already past the front beam and headed for the cloth beam. (I know that means nothing to non-weavers.)

I like the way it turned out, so I decided to do more weaving with several strands held together. Several years ago, at an antique/junk store in Paducah, I bought many cones of thread that had come from one of the clothing factories in Mayfield (all of them long closed.) I put ten of them in a basket, pulled the ends out and wrapped them as one thread onto a stick shuttle.

This is the result.

The picture is a bit blurred, but I like the fabric. I got 2 1/2 mugrugs from the first shuttle-full and have wound another shuttle with the same ten threads to weave more. Then I think I'll use a different combination of colors. This will be fun!

I also did some spinning. Yesterday, after finally getting a lawn mower started and mowing the fenced area of my back yard, I took a spinning wheel out to the back porch to cool down from that exertion. (We've had two days of beautiful weather - temperatures in the low-80's with low humidity. The A/C is off and the windows are open!) I spun one bobbin about half full and plied it with a half-bobbin I had spun a long time ago. Today I took the wheel out on the front porch, spun two bobbins half full and plied them together. Here's one of the bobbins of two-ply yarn.

While I was spinning yesterday, I though of one of the conversations my sisters and I had during their visit, about differences in boys and girls. When I have demonstrated spinning at various events, I've noticed that the men and boys (even quite young ones) are usually more interested in the mechanics of the wheel than in the fact that I'm turning that bunch of fluff into string.