"Before the Trip and During......"

Don and I drove out to Denver, CO, to visit friends and relatives. A cousin of Don's on his mothers side of the family lives outside of Denver and had a "mini gathering" of the Anderson Clan. Her sister and brother in law came from New Jersey, another cousin came from Des Moines, IA, and we represented WI. :) The main reason for doing this now is there will be a big family reunion this July in Des Moines, and they wanted to gather together family information/photos to prepare for the reunion. It was also for fun, too. More on that later when I post photos of our trip.

Before leaving, I finished spinning my 1st skein of yarn. Unfortunately, in these photos I have not "wet finished" the yarn yet, so it still isn't as relaxed as it was after the wet finishing. I was pretty happy with the results of my 1st attempt at spinning. Needless to say, although I will.....I am "hooked". :)


A close up view of the yarn. It is a 2 ply yarn.......meaning I spun 2 bobbins of yarn (singles), then spun them together, creating a 2 ply yarn.


This was some roving that I had from when I bought the loom from Mary. I tried plying it with another single of the black/white yarn. Both singles were more consistently of one size with less slubs (thicker areas vs. thin areas) in them. I think the skein turned out fairly well, too.......it is a consistently thinner yarn throughout the entire skein. I still have to wet finish the skein and take photos for posting.


Don's cousin Donna lives with her partner Henry, in Lakewood, CO, a suburb of Denver. We spent a fair amount of time at her house. With me, is cousin Sherri from Des Moines. (Notice the green bag....it held my knitting. I finished a sock while there.)


I did a lot of reading and knitting while the cousins shared family information and scanned photos. We'd brought Don's scanner along for this purpose. He has quite a bit of the family ancestry on his website and possibly (probably) the most complete.

I had gone to the local fiber shop (The Recycled Lamb), bought some roving/magazines to commemorate our trip to CO, and was reading the spinning magazine, "Spin-Off". The women working that day were quite impressed to learn that I lived close to Susan's Fiber Shop, where I had bought my spinning wheel. They knew of her because of her advertisements in fiber magazines as well as an instructor at the Estes Park, CO, Fiber Festival, which by the way, will be held this coming weekend. I was out to Susan's yesterday and she'd just come home from a show in Missouri, soon to leave for Estes Park. I'm not sure I'd enjoy so much traveling, but it is lucrative, and gets your name out there........