CraftyJAKS: June 2019 // Welsh

I was so excited to spin this month’s club fibre that I had to put it away, out of sight to be spun after some other time-sensitive projects were finished first. Then … I forgot about it. Can you believe it? Sometimes life just happens around you and in the daily grind, you get caught up in it all. As we neared the middle of the month, I remembered that I should probably work on this month’s fibre. Then I remembered that it was the last one and I decided to savor the spin, take my time and just enjoy the process.

The singles spun up really quickly and I spent a lot of several mornings just spinning on my Majacraft Suzie, enjoying the process.

Each nest worked its way around the rainbow and I thought of this spin as a ‘circle’ because the pink nicely begins the spin but the purple could have easily started … or the blue or the orange or any of them. I’d like to find a way to showcase that in a finished item – probably in a brioche cowl like this one.

As I finally began spinning, I noticed a lot of kemp in the Welsh. This isn’t uncommon in Welsh Mountain – they tend to be kempy but this doesn’t bother me because even through the spinning, washing and finishing, the kemp is steadily falling out. The nice thing about kemp is that as it falls out, it will lessen over time and leave you with an amazing yarn in the end. While Welsh isn’t a particularly ‘soft’ yarn, I like the variety of spinning many different fibres and having a handspun stash rich in variety to fulfill different needs. I am quite intrigued with the idea of adapting that cowl pattern into a knitted pillow pattern. It’s important to think outside the box!

In the end, I chain-plied this yarn and shared doing so on the most recent podcast episode. If you’d like to see, you can find the episode here and the time stamp is 51:44. I hope you enjoy just watching me work through the process and plying.

Happy Spinning!