I had an urge to fondle wool so we made a quick weekend trip the Black Sheep Gathering in Eugene on Saturday and then visited with a good friend on Sunday.

We arrived just as folks were setting up booths. Hand Jive’s colorful display of hand painted yarn and sock patterns was the first booth to catch my eye. I picked up a couple of skeins of Nature’s Palette merino fingering weight yarn, which looks very similar to Koigu.

I continued to browse the various wool and equipment vendors but had a hard time deciding on what to buy so I took a break from shopping to check out wool on the hoof. This Wensleydale cross from Carlson Farm has the most beautiful curly wool. It didn’t take much imagine to visual how pleasant it would be to spinning straight from the locks.

At noon I attended Annie Dachnal’s demonstration on spinning multicolored roving which was based on a workshop taught by Lynne Vogel at SOAR last year.

Besides covering five different techniques for spinning these colorful rovings (check out Lynne’s book, The Twisted Sister’s Sock Workbook), she also demonstrated Andean Plying, which is useful for plying from both ends of one bobbin.

This was a timely topic since I had just bought a couple of these rovings before the talk and had no idea that there are so many ways to spin it up.

Here’s a bit of one roving that I spun on my new Tabachek spindle. I’m always on the look out for a well balanced and long spinning spindle. This one has quickly become my favorite.