Over the past year or two I had become extremely frustrated with my Majacraft Suzie Pro spinning wheel. Whilst I could spin a lovely 2 ply dk weight, and even a nice fingering weight 2 ply, I just couldn't get enough twist in my singles for what I really love to knit with: laceweight 2 ply and thinner.

I finally decided "damn the cost" and asked Jenny from the very fabulous Virginia Farm Woolworks how much a high speed kit for my wheel would cost and she told me about something I'd never heard of before: the high speed whorl! At about 1/6 the cost of the high speed kit, I decided to try it (and some cotton carders and the new Ashford carding book, but that's a review for after Christmas)

:-P

My lovely new little whorl arrived yesterday morning, so I put it on my wheel, which was incredibly easy to do with just a twist of an alan key (which you get with the whorl). I really like the ease of changing the whorl because I definitely still want to spin the occasional dk and heavier 2 ply, and you can't do that very easily with the high speed whorl.

My heart's desire is to spin a 2 ply yarn akin to a commercial 2/22. Yep, that stuff that lace knitters love. Curious to see if it was possible with the high speed whorl I decided to pick up a bit of fluff and have a go. (It isn't possible to spin a usable yarn that fine with the regular whorl no matter how fast you treadle, unless you're using a very long staple fiber).

Here's a photo of me plying the yarn:

At the top is my handspun single, the bottom ply is a commercial polyester machine embroidery thread.

The finished yarn, sort of life size (on my monitor anyway). The green yarn is an Aussie 8 ply weight commercial yarn (dk weight to the non-Aussies).

My rating of the high speed whorl? Absolutely brilliant!

My next spinning project will be the same weight as the above thread, one ply a lavender wool/silk mix and the other ply a bright white mulberry silk. I want to knit something fabulous using my skull and crossbones lace stitch.

In knitting news, I finally got around to blocking the "No Longer Badly Written Doily". I changed the colour in the first photo so you could see the pattern better.

and here is it's real colour.

I didn't need to use pins to block it because it's mercerised cotton and this particular brand (Coats Petra 8) seems to block out nicely without pins. The difference in lace knitting after blocking will never cease to entertain me. Before blocking it always looks like something the cat hacked up, after blocking it's always gorgeous.