We all know that cats love to play with yarn. Anything that moves, it seems. But how about cuddle up to a ball of yarn? Here’s my photographic proof that cats love yarn, they really, really do. These are my 11 and 13 year old cats, cuddled up to some of my handspun on two different occasions:
Life would be so boring without pets! 🙂
Back in November I blogged about spinning bouclé yarn for the first time. I loved the technique so much it lead me to experiment with other fibers other than mohair to see what the end result would be. Here are some closeups of the finished products.
The above photos are all mohair. I dyed these after the yarn was spun, and will do a post about the dyeing process soon. I am really growing to love dyeing both fleece and yarn.
So this was interesting. I spun some silk and then looped it as a bouclĂ© on some handspun alpaca. After it was finished, I washed and fulled it (a process of shocking the yarn with hot/cold water so that it felts a little bit) and regretted it! I loved how it looked straight off the wheel, but thought it really lost a lot of its character and looked rather clumpy after the fulling process. Now that it has been hanging up in the studio for awhile, I am intrigued with it. Hopefully over winter break I’ll have a chance to knit it up & see what it looks like.
Alpaca makes a really nice bouclĂ©, too – very similar to mohair. I finish plied this with handspun silk and it looks so yummy against the dark alpaca fiber. I just wish I could have gotten a better picture of the entire skein, it was hard to do since it is so dark. I’ll definitely share once I have it knitted up in something.
I’m definitely bouclĂ© hooked. So many ideas! I’m taking a break from that to do some core spun yarns which I will share more about in the New Year.
