I have returned from work the past few days a little bit brain worn and weary, and thought that it might be a good idea to find something automatic and tactile to enjoy creating, where I wasn’t trying to tackle complicated matches or the realisation of a grand design; where there would be no charts and diagrams to put together at the end and it would be a finished item for my enjoyment alone, and so I decided to give my wheel a bit of TLC and treat myself to some new fibre.

I discovered the Etsy shop of Welsh fibre seller Justadaydream and decided to try a couple of batts in the colour way ‘Storm’, merino fibre with added angelina for a touch of lightning-like sparkle. As the UK at the moment is receiving quite a battering from flooding and very high winds, the colour way seemed to perfectly match the sky whilst I was browsing online, looking for the perfect purchase.

Until quite recently it was difficult to know where to store hand-spun yarn in your Ravelry stash, and whether to list the fibre itself as a stash item, but the support for spinners has grown fabulously on the site over the past year or so. There is now a space for fibre stash, plus the resulting handspun yarn has both a space among your entire stash and can also be easily found in a dedicated handspun tab. What’s more, there are dedicated project pages for spinning projects with an array of options and attributes that’s quite dizzying for a novice spinner such as myself.

Unfortunately spinning works in progress do not appear along with the knitting & crochet works in progress in the progress bars app (such as the one in my sidebar) but hopefully this is functionality that is not too far off going into development.

I’m about 40% of the way through the first of the matching batts and hope to spin up something approaching a simple 2-ply gradient yarn once I have finished, but for now it is a wonderful evening activity to relax to, plus I like to kid myself that all the treading is giving my calves at least the tiniest work out…