Trying new things

One of the things I learned at Stringtopia was how awesome Jacey Boggs is. Jacey blogs and does other stuff at Insubordiknit. At Stringtopia she taught me corespinning and boucle. I still have to practice my boucle. I'm working on it. (Did I mention there wasn't much spinning right post-Stringtopia?) This is my class sample.



The other stuff she was teaching was awesome too. So when I found out she was teaching at Midwest Fiber and Folk, I signed right up. Cables and Crepes was the first class, and Thick-and-Thin and Coils was the second.

I'm going to start with the coils. Coils are AWESOME.

Here are my class samples. Jacey's very good at breaking down the various steps of these yarns.


Thick-and-thin and coils are both rhythmic. I really like them. And coils are a really nice outlet for the control freak in me. I can make them Just Right, and it's awesome.

Here are the coils I spun last week:


They're better. Imagine that!

I don't have my class sample from the Cables and Crepes class. I kind of struggled in there. Balance is very important in cabled yarn, and I'm not used to paying a lot of attention to balance, because sometimes extra twist in one direction or another is useful, and it takes a lot of imbalance to affect a finished knit fabric by biasing it.

But I was determined not to let my unsuccessful class sample keep me down, and I came home and spun this:



Which is pretty good in places, if not as consistent as I'd like. I'll continue to work on it.

So, to conclude: coils are awesome; cables were way harder than expected, but gratifying to get rightish. Jacey is brilliant and fun and I will definitely take classes from her again, and I bought her video so that if I want to try other things, I can see how she does it. (And holy cow, SO MUCH stuff to try in that video!)