Mary spun a little lamb

Seriously: if this much yarn doesn't add up to a whole lamb's worth, I'll stop buying butter tarts from the cottage's nearest milk shop.

(well, maybe not.  they are really, really amazing butter tarts.)

Remember how much I was hoping to spin in July?  It was fourteen braids of fiber.  Just over 1600 grams.  A ton, in other words. And partly because my math was wrong and I overestimated how many braids I had by one, I came really close!

How close, you ask?

giant fiber monsters poised to devour the citizens of Singles Town

I missed just one.  Which means I spun twelve braids of fiber in one month (the one that's missing from the top corner of this picture is already a scarf.)  And some days, I didn't get to spin at all, so I guess I'm even more compulsive than I thought.  Are you surprised?

Every July since I started to spend that month spinning, my skill with the wheel has improved hugely owing to the principle of Practice Makes Perfect. 

I can spin mostly-even yarn now, and I can do it without working very hard. 

The fiber almost never breaks off in my hand as I treadle any more. 

My default mode has switched to a pretty fine thread, so if I want sport weight I almost need to do a three-ply and if I want bulky weight (my former default) I have to pay attention. 

I can spin a quarter of a braid for bulky yarn in about 45 minutes.  If I'm doing my default slim thread, it takes about two hours. 

If I'm doing my default slim thread and don't need to think about what I'm doing, I can perch my iPhone on my knee and read a book while I spin.  I read many books that way this July because of the 8-hours-per-braid thing, even though a lot of what I spun was bulky.

But the biggest thing I learned?

It's how amazing eleven braids of fiber look when they're spun into forty-four tiny balls of handspun yarn.

So amazing that in the afternoon of July 31st when I should have called it a month, I just had to get a start on the last braid (I mentioned I'm compulsive, right?)

Thanks for all your patience with a full month of handspinning.  I'd like to tell you I'm not back into Sock Land now but... you know.  They're a key part of the magical world of Stalled Project Cleanup. At least this time they're scenery and not the destination!

Hope you get a great start to the week today and I'll see you tomorrow with something interesting to look at.