Finishing felt piece and Handspun 3 ply socks!

One advantage to this snow is being house bound, which ofcourse means lots of woolwork oportunities! So I've finally been able to finish off my felt commision. It worked out OK in the end, but I was worried when I'd finished wet felting the basic piece and it was just erm VERY ABSTRACT, which wasn't what I was aiming for. Luckily the power of a dry felting needle helped me to resolve some areas and give it a little more definition. Hooray for the versatility of wool!

My other triumphant finishing moment was this morning with these socks. Wonderful warm cosy woolly socks for Me! made from my very own hand plant dyed, handspun three ply wool yarns. The toes and heels are deliberately more hard wearing, ie slightly thicker and plied very tightly! I've had problems in the past with having to continually darn 100% wool socks, so I shall see, and possibly update you, as to how well these wear. The wools used are2 plys of texel and one of blue faced leicester. The heels and toes "Tweedy Yarn" is a very random selection of gathered from barbed wire wool, odd bits of merino, silk, kempy wools, slightly felted in dyeing experiments etc. The plant dyed colours are from onion skins(bronze), elderberries (green), exhausted damsons (pink), elder + tumeric (mossy green).
I hadn't really gone for it with 3 plying before, but I really enjoyed the mixing of the colours and the round springiness of the yarns. A 3 ply really did make my ribs "pop" in a way a 2 ply or singles wouldn't've (is that a word?).

Navajo Ply, first attempt!

This is my first ever attempt at Navajo Plying!
Using my birthday money I splashed out and bought some handpainted wool tops (mostly in green of course). This one is from Wheeldale Woolcrafts, and very reasonably priced...
For my birthday I'd also got some books about spinning "Get Spun" by S North, and "Spin Control" by Amy Singer, the first a more"Art" (as opposed to the "primitive" or "punk" yarns I  produced in the beginning..)Yarn how to, the second, an in depth analysis and explaination of all the building blocks of skill, and their reasons for being in the spinning pantheon. These ofcourse have been inspiring me to develop my spinning repertoire, and causing many wide awake small hours brain meanderings of  spinning creativity, as I plot my next yarns... Some ofcourse just happen as they go along...
However, more to the point, the above yarn occured because I could actually UNDERSTAND Amy Singer's directions for Navajo Plying. This, I think, is because she likens it to chain stitch in crocheting, and really in essence that's all it is, a series of both edges of  the loops pulled through each other (in a chain), fairly large, and plied together with the strand you are holding, ofcourse the thing I hadn't previously realised was that Navajo Ply is a 3 ply, NOT a 2 ply! Well it's one Singles Plied on itself into a 3 Ply. Anyway....

It worked out okay, except that it's a little hard to keep the tension on all 3 strands even and sometimes mine crossed over. But when I did my (normal) 3ply sock wool (plant dyed greens, BFL and Cheviot, and natural Texel) I found that a little easier, see? Just above...