Foiled (I hope)

Ordinarily, my cats leave fiber alone. However. Beau the Feline Destroyer of All Things Nice sometimes eats roving. Not just any roving - he does have his standards - but this habit has interfered with my desire to move a spinning wheel to the den. I came up with this idea, though.

The roving is protected by a gallon Ziploc bag. So far, this has worked. The real test will be with Shetland top, which seems to be Beau's favorite fiber for consumption. We shall see.

Fiber prep: With some help from my granddaughter, we cranked the rest of the red Tunis through the drum carder, in half-ounce chunks.
Spinning: I have started spinning some of this red Tunis and, yes, there is less VM in it. What a relief!

I seem to have developed a bit of a case of agoraphobia from the pandemic. I tend to be a homebody to begin with, so enjoyed having an excuse to not go anywhere. Now that things are opening up a bit, I find I still don't want to go anywhere. I was planning to attend the weaving guild meeting in person this past week, but at the last minute decided to Zoom it. I'm glad I Zoomed, as I was tired anyway.

I'm glad I attended, though. The program was on yarn, or more specifically, the making of yarn. Even though I feel like I know about yarn, I still learned a thing or two from the presentation. For example, pulling yarn from a center-pull yarn can result in the untwisting of the plies. To avoid this, when winding a skein on a ball winder, first slide a toilet paper core over the center of the ball winder and wind the yarn onto it. Then when using the yarn, be it for knitting or weaving or whatever, insert a dowel or straight knitting needle into the core and unwind the ball from the outside. A couple of strategically placed holes in a shoe box to support the dowel helps faciliate this.