Good morning and happy Friday to you. I hope you are doing well.

I have a few things to tell you about today, but above all, I wanted to tell you about my Spinner’s Advent Calendar giveaway. I am giving away the very last fiber Advent calendar, and the only requirement is something you’ve already done, which is to sign up for my newsletter.

The winner will receive 24 little boxes of luxury fiber to spin or felt plus a little gift for Christmas. Most of the boxes will contain fiber I have dyed, but there will be a few other interesting add-ins too.

You can enter the giveaway on my website right here. I’ll be announcing the winner in next Friday’s newsletter and by email, and I’ll be sending the Advent Calendar by November 20th.

I did have to limit the giveaway to people living in The United States just because of shipping.

Speaking of Advent Calendars…

Speaking of Advent Calendars, I am in the process of packaging up the Yarn Advent Calendars now, so I’ll be shipping those a little earlier than anticipated so I can get to work on the fiber ones. If you ordered one, you can expect to receive an email as soon as I ship yours with the tracking so you can see just where it is. That makes this a great opportunity to tell your email program that my emails are not junk.

Spin Together

The big spinning competition was last week, and it was so much fun to finally get to spin during this, our third year of the competition. I am definitely not going to win any prizes for highest yardage, but it was lots of fun. One of my goals was to spin up some of my art batts and then photograph the yarn so you can get an idea of how the art batts spin up. Think of it as a yarn swatch for fiber.

I do have a funny story from the week. The competition ended at noon on Saturday. On Friday night, I spun until midnight. I planned to get up at 6 a.m. to finish the skein I was plying when I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore and then maybe, just maybe spin and ply two more art batts. Well, I slept in until 8 a.m., which is almost unprecedented for me, so it was a rush to the finish. After finishing the plying and spinning up another art batt at about a fingering weight, I realized I wouldn’t have time to spin another art batt at the same degree of fineness and ply it, so I decided to spin a nice thick and thin yarn and ply it to the finer ply as a spiral yarn. A spiral yarn is where a finer yarn spirals around a thicker one, and it has great texture. I finished the second skein and was about halfway through plying them at 11:30. With just 30 minutes to go, the foot connector to one of the two pedals of my spinning wheel broke. I kept trying to spin by alternately pedaling with one pedal and turning the wheel with one hand while plying with the other.

My oldest son came out to the front porch where I was spinning and said, “Keep spinning,” while he went running back and forth to the garage to try to find a solution to fix the pedal temporarily. Eventually he came up with the idea of using vice-grips and zip ties, and it worked! I finished plying the skein at 11:58 a.m.–just two minutes ahead of the noon deadline.

I knew spinning was relaxing, and I knew it was meditative, but who knew spinning could be so exciting?

Here’s my personal favorite skein that I spun this week:

I spun it from art batts inspired by Monet’s “The Houses of Parliament, London, with the Sun Peaking through the Fog.” This was the club colorway last March, and it’s one of a few I’ll be adding to the shop. I’ll have these as art batts in the shop next month.

All in all I spun about 3-3/4 miles of yarn, including credit for plying. Now I get to decide what to do with the yarn. I have some weaving projects I’m planning. I really love to use hand-dyed yarn for the warp and handspun yarn for the weft. I’ll show you when I have something made.

New This Week

In between Spin Together and packaging Adent calendars, I have dyed a few new things. There’s Marigold, Purple Delight, Sage, and Monet’s Water Lilies in the shop on a variety of yarn bases. You can find them all right here.

Here’s the Monet’s Water Lilies shown on Sparkly Merino Sock:

While I was dyeing up Monet’s Water Lilies, I decided to dye up Ice to go with it. That’s the same as the lightest blue in Monet’s Water Lilies. I still have to photograph that, but it should be in the shop this weekend.

It also goes beautifully with Lilac, which I have a few skeins of.

An Apology

I have to apology for something I didn’t even know was happening until today. When I made one change to my shop, it messed up the shipping system, so if you had trouble trying to place an order in the last few days, that is the reason. I am 99% sure it’s all fixed now, but if you have any difficulties, please don’t hesitate to email me so I can help.

Upcoming Show and Tell

I would like to do another Show and Tell newsletter next week or possibly the week after. If you have finished items or works in progress to share, I would love that. Please email them to me with the yarn and pattern info. Hopefully your project can inspire someone else’s and vice-versa.

Have a wonderful weekend, and happy fiber artistry!