Spinning Quite a Yarn

I was super excited when Lauren McElroy’s Crafter’s Box collaboration was announced. I love her Instagram content and have always been interested in learning to use a drop spindle, so it was a perfect box to spend some birthday money on.

There was a small bit of a learning curve, as you can see from the progression in that photo, but the video class was so easy to follow. I even started incorporating some color with some roving from Ganxxet.

Once I had a good amount of two-ply yarn, I wanted to create a project with it. I swatched a bit in crochet and knitting to decide which looked better. The crochet showed off the variation in the thickness (which we will pretend was intentional), so I started a hat.

The yarns I used were about 4-5 WPI, and I roughly measured the smallest amount to find out that I had about 6.9 yards per 10 grams. This hat used 58 grams of the all-white yarn and 41 grams of the blue/purple/white yarn. Really rough estimates mean that I used around 68.31 yards in total.

I’ve also started experimenting with chain plying the yarn (the two small skeins in this picture), which is a lot of fun. I don’t have enough of it yet to do much with it, but I’m thinking maybe gloves.

If you are looking to learn drop spindle spinning, I’d definitely recommend this kit. It’s still available through The Crafter’s Box Marketplace, and they have some accessories you can also pick up through the marketplace to create even more yarns.


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Frocktober Is Over

And I almost made it. I mean, I did make 31 drawings and use all of the prompts from the list, but I just finished today. That means it took me 5 days longer than it should’ve, but I did stop to focus on the Snuggle Bug Sweater I was test knitting halfway through the month.

This time around, I used a mixed media spiral drawing pad. I have to say, I kind of regretted that choice toward the end because all of my skin tone markers are dried out. But I wanted to use what I had, and I had this notebook sitting around.

I definitely got sloppy with my proportions over time, and started rushing them to just be done, but I also ended up with quite a few that I was really happy with. I also really liked drawing in a bunch of different skin tones and hair styles. That was something that we really didn’t do in school and I hadn’t really been doing since I finished school either. But it definitely makes this collection of drawings a lot more fun.

I’m really glad I went with Amy Mebberson‘s list of prompts this year. Having the structure of focusing on outfits instead of just a bunch of random drawings definitely helped in coming up with something to draw every day.


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