insomnia, my new friend

I finished picking the yarns for the kits yesterday. I'm so excited to have that settled. So excited, in fact, that I went to bed late and then woke up at 2:30, all wired. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and decided to spin until I got tired. Well, I spun and spun, the cat came and went, the sun came up, and I was still spinning. I got the long-draw thing to work on the BFL from Little Barn, and it was totally awesome. (Now that I have read at least one official spinning book's passage on long draw, I've concluded that I'm not doing it wrong or in a weird way. As far as I can see, the only thing that's different is that I'm using both hands to control the fiber supply and you're supposed to use only one. But since nobody shows up in my yarn haven with a ruler to smack my knuckles, I can get away with this.)
I kept expecting to get sleepy, but I never did. I just kept at it. Also, since I'm not planning to ply this yarn, I could fill the bobbins totally full--yes! Here's the first one.


It's a little thicker and twistier than my ideal, but that's a clear reaction to all that air yarn and breakage earlier in the week. The second bobbin is more like it.
Now, I only own three Kromski bobbins, and I do want to spin other things before I'll have a chance to get all this yarn knitted, so I had to park this stuff somewhere else. I made some storage bobbins for myself before I bought Anastasia, my spinning wheel, but they're too long--I wasn't expecting to be able to use the wheel to drive them, but you can't even just hang them from the rod the bobbin usually rides on and spin them yourself by hand. I did make a lazy kate, but its patented friction tensioning system (ha ha) was really dragging the process down a lot. But then it occurred to me that if I put a little bit of wool between the wood base and the end of the bobbin, the bobbin would probably spin very nicely. Sure enough, it worked like a charm. So I had the Kromski bobbin on the wheel with no tension to feed from, and I just turned the storage bobbin with my finger on the lazy kate, and it did not take forever. I was pleased.
I don't even have enough storage bobbins to put the second bobbin of BFL onto, though. I guess it's going to have to go on a t.p. roll.
Meanwhile, here is the yarn collection for the crazy skew active singles scarf. (Yes, the purple yarn in the front is plied, but it's going in anyway for a little bit of different texture. I may make some active singles from that roving too.)


I can't wait to cast on!