Oatmeal

Porridge, flapjack, that slightly weird Scottish pudding that tastes like cold porridge with lots of whisky, fruity crumble topping, more flapjack - all good, all oatmeal.

You may not be able to make flapjack with the kind of oatmeal that I've been playing with recently (and woe betide anyone who tries) but it is none the less gorgeous for that:


This is the first of my 'practice' fibre that I got from Wingham Woolworks at the same time as my wheel, 100g of Blue Faced Leicester combed top in a natural oatmeal colour. They had white and cream and things like that but I fancied something a little different.

The aim was to spin a two ply of whatever came out of my fingers and to try to get to know the wheel a little bit in the process. In practice it turned out to be wonderfully easy to spin into what for me is a remarkably fine singles. I think that the fact that it is undyed does make it easier to spin because there's no dye clumping bits together so it spun up with minimal pre-drafting.

The other wonderful thing is how much faster it is to spin on the wheel - it would have taken so much longer by spindle!

Anyway, I ended up with these:





I plied the two bobbins together until the shorter one ran out - my spinning has got finer as I worked my way through the 100g and it shows; and then I wound the remains of the second bobbin onto my ball winder and plied the two ends together to use up the rest of the yarn. Both skeins had a good soak in some Eucalan and a snap and thwack against the kitchen door. Et voila:

530 ish yards of 2ply that falls somewhere between laceweight and 4ply - it's 20wpi.

It's soft and squishy and I still have to run around the house squeaking "LOOK what I made!"


And of course the obligatory penny shot!



I've been eyeing up potential patterns and I need to have a good look through my lace books but the current front runner is the Flutter scarf which I think would show off the yarn to best advantage - it has a subtly shifting brown/grey mix - and also allow for some of the more slubby bits of yarn to be a feature rather than a mistake.

If you can think of anything else that would look just perfect in 530 yards of grey/brown laceweight let me know!