Adventures in spinning

A week ago Saturday I want to Dixon's Lambtown. It is a fairly small festival, but I wanted the opportunity to take a spinning class. The only spinning class given in my area requires owning a spindle and a set of carders on top of the fee for the class. So, after two hours with my small spindle I had a tiny ball that I plyed on itself.

Two spindlefuls later I tried plying. I got this:
I still had quite a bit of the first ball of roving, but I was tired of poorly spinning plain colored, ugly yarn. I decided to try dyeing the roving, hoping color would detract from the poor spinning. After WAY too much research, I started to dye.

I set out the saran wrap on my table, while my roving soaked. I prepared two colors. The first was two packages of Ice Blue Raspeberry Lemonaide in a lot of water. I added a sprinkling of Grape, and another half package of Ice Blue. I made a batch of dark red (two packaged Black Cherry), with only 7 tablespoons of water. I was afraid the blue was too thin, so I boiled it a bit to get some water out. Of course I then had to let it cool. I layed the roving out, folding it four times. (unfortunately I did not do this with the ends at the ends of the bends, and this caused some potential problems later, which never came up since I didn't ply it.)

I dyed the red first in patches. I worked the dye into the roving. It took a lot more dye than I thought, but didn't realize that the dye would spread later. I did the blue and lightly worked them together. I rolled it up and started to steam it. Here came the unexpected complications.

The water was too high and leaked into my steamer, and in turn into the roving. This caused the dye to blend more. I had to empty out some of the water and I turned the roving sausage over. It continued to steam, and the dye continued to leak. I didn't need to use so much. The steaming process would have spread out the dye to the undyed fibers. Or, maybe if I had wrapped the sausage tighter to prevent water/steam from getting in.

After 30~40 minutes I put the sausage into a glass brownie pan (8X8 Pyrex) and microwaved it for about 1 minute to make sure the dye was set. (I didn't do the whole 2 minutes recommended because the sausage was puffing up to the point I was afraid it would burst.) I set the whole thing into the sink to cool. It expedite the process I filled the bottom with water until the touched just the bottom of the pan. I added some ice to help out too.

After it cooled I rinsed it, and set it out to dry. I was happy to see that almost no dye came out from the roving. The whole process made the house smell fruity. It reminded me of getting snowcones with my family in the summer. The only flavor I could remember was "Tiger's blood", so that was what I named it.
I spun it, but figured out I would only get 35 yards if I plyed. So I decided to make it a one ply. Of course, it was terribly over spun.I washed the yarn, set the twist, then "blocked it" out. I dry it with a 4 pound bag of sugar hanging from the bottom. The finished skein, dyed, spun and set by me:
97 yards of somewhere between a fingering and a lace weight. And I have no idea what to do with it.