My First Yarn!

A while back I posted that I started spinning yarn on my drop spindle.  Well, I'm happy to report I've made my first yarn!  Yesterday I finished spinning the last of the gorgeous blue and purple roving.  I wound the first half into a ball, and the second half on an empty toilet paper roll.

I needed to get the yarn wound around something so I could form a hank (a big loop of yarn).  I thought I had a niddy noddy, but I looked all around and couldn't find it.  I'm still waiting on that fairy to come organize my yarn stash and all my tools.  So I had to improvise.  As Tim Gunn would say, I had to "Make it work!".

Turns out, treadmills really do come in handy for something!

I wound the yarn around the treadmill, then used pieces of string to tie the yarn all around, so it wouldn't tangle.

Then, to set the twist in the yarn (so it wouldn't untwist), I soaked it in hot water.  You can see how much the yarn wanted to twist back up after I removed the hank from the treadmill.

After squeezing out the excess water and "thwacking" the yarn on the counter (to relax the yarn fibers?), I hung it outside, using a can to slightly weight it and help it dry nicely.

I'm so excited to use it! I'm not sure how many yards I have, so I need to figure that out before I figure out what I want to do with it.  Our county fair is coming up in August, and there are classes for "handspun yarn" and "handspun knitted article", so I'm not sure if I'll make it into something or just enter it as yarn.  There are quite a few inconsistencies, so I'm leaning toward knitting something in the hopes that the inconsistencies will look more like art yarn than mistakes.  :-)