You know that whole spin-dye-knit thing? Long overdue on the spinning part.

Richard bought me one of the Kickstarter Electric Eel Wheels (and seriously: they call it the EEW) for Christmas. Only thing is he’s been wishing I would try it out once to make sure it works okay before wrapping it up and pretending I don’t know about it.

Today greed finally got me motivated: Colourmart was selling their mill ends of their mill ends of cashmere and there were some listed at ohmygoodness prices even for them and the best bargains, of course, were on the cobweb weight that few people want.

I actually had a few cones of taupe cobweb 90% cashmere 10% nylon that I bought from a wholesaler years ago, and at the time I spun and spun and spun and dyed and made all kinds of things out of it. Two cashmere afghans. And then I’d just plain needed to do something else that wasn’t brown-based and the last of the cones were left half-forgotten. They take a lot of work to be usable.

Tonight I pulled two out, set up that new electric wheel, read the instructions twice, had the resident geek going over it too because, hey, gadgets, and sat down to see how fast I could make this stuff usable now.

About two hours and I had 637 yards of 4-ply on the first skein and I’ve run out of time to hank and count the yards on the second but I’d guess about 250 yards. That’s a huge payoff on the time.

But see, I had two cones of the taupe to work from. If I were to buy the black, I’d only have the one in that color and I am not going to hand wind thousands upon thousands of cobweb yards in black–I’d have to ply it with something else. (Edited to add: duh. You don’t wind it by hand, you use the machine and a bobbin. So yeah, I ordered it.)

Like red. Ooh, I like that…!