Sometimes The Bear Gets You

My high-school Latin teacher used to say, "Sometimes you get the bear; sometimes the bear gets you!" Imagine this fiber was the bear:


It royally kicked my butt on the spinning wheel. I can't begin to tell you how much trouble I had spinning this stuff. It's one of the mystery fibers I picked up from A New Yarn — so soft that I originally wondered if it might not be something like camel. (Okay, if you've worked with camel and looked at the picture and thought, "What on earth was she thinking?!" because you know at a glance it's not camel, please cut me some slack — I'm totally just feeling my way through this mystery fiber thing right now.)

I did eventually get it all spun into singles and plied into this skein:


We have here 80 yards — spun mostly 2-ply, with the last dozen yards spun Navajo 3-ply. I figured it'd given me so much trouble that it probably wouldn't be worth much as an addition to my stash, so why not make the 3-ply experiment? A day later, while petting the finished product and trying to figure out what I would make from it, something about the texture reminded me of... could it be...????


A trip to the Weaving Works confirmed it. This stuff isn't wool at all. It's cotton. No wonder it kicked my butt all over the place! I'm amazed it came out as well as it did.

I call the yarn "Red Bear" — because this one got me!