Fiber Flirtations: Corriedale

It's been a busy few weeks, as I've worked on fellowship applications and Coffeeboy has prepared for a campus interview. We just returned from that interview yesterday, and he feels it went well. so far as one can tell. The trip took us both across the country for a few days, to the state where I grew up, California. The weather was hot and hazy from fires, quite a change from the early winter temperatures we're having in Western NC.

Thanks for all your good wishes after the conference! Now we'll need them to make it through the next hurdles. We won't know anything else from them until a month from now, though, so it'll be a sort of crazy month of waiting. Meanwhile, he's had another on-campus cancelled for funding reasons (or something like that) and another scheduled for sometime in late January. I'm still waiting to hear from my one interview school, but am not expecting anything until next week or the week after. And of course, if I hear nothing, then that answers that question...

Meanwhile, I've been remiss in updating you on the spinning! As you might guess from the post's title, I'm going to start a "series" of "Fiber Flirtations" in which I'll post about my experiences spinning with different fibers. After all, I collected such a variety at SAFF that now I need to be able to talk about them!

My first "flirtation" isn't really a flirtation, but more of a long series of dates. I spun some Corriedale pretty early on in my spinning adventures (remember this deep red gift yarn?) Corriedale, as I understand it, is a longish wool, very good for beginners, so it made sense for me to spin with it both when I was starting out, trying to go thinner, and also once I wanted to go thick again. The giftee of the red yarn gifted me back with some gorgeous tweedy light-blue corriedale, a whole 12 oz. of it, which I spent much of the spring and early summer spinning. I ended up spinning it much thinner than I'd anticipated, going for a three-ply, hence the long time spent working on it.



I ended up with varying amounts on the bobbins, so I had 2 skeins of three-ply, one of 2-ply, and one of navajo/chain-ply. I think I spun and plied the yarn at a 10:1 ratio and ended up with something between fingering and sport weight. All told there's something like 930 yards there, plenty plenty to make something really nice. I think it'll have to marinate in the stash for a while while I figure out just what's right!



My next spinning adventure in Corriedale took me to Colonial wool, in a navy multi colorway from Paradise Fibers that Coffeeboy gifted me with last year. This time, I wanted to spin it thicker, aiming for a worsted. I got something closer to heavy worsted or bulky than true worsted, but oh well.



The yarn is 8 oz, a three-ply, about 250 yards. I don't remember the ratio I spun this with; probably either 8: or 10:1. I also spun up 8 oz. of the same fiber in a multi-red brick colorway, but I haven't taken pictures of it yet... I think I ended up with about the same amount of yarn, though.

I'm not yet sure what I'll do with all these new yarns; the colonial wool will probably become a hat or a cowl or something like that, I'm just not sure! What I do know is that I have 2 weeks to get a passable draft of the next chapter of the dissertation finished, and that I should probably turn my attention in that direction for a while!