H_Thompson

I am an illustrator of the fantastic. Firebirds, dragons, and fantastic scenes abound in my work, with topics ranging from obscure myths to modern games.
I sell giclee prints of my original artwork, beeswax candles, and assorted colors of yarn priced by the yard.

My paintings take anywhere from eight hours to eight months. I also own an Ashford Traveler MK1 Spinning Wheel, and make frequent use of it, crafting a variety of art yarn for the connoisseur. The result is an assortment of striped, candy cane, three color, variegated, and plain yarn- none of it dyed. Color limited only by color of the fiber still leaves quite an assortment. I work in bast fibers and animal fur, from sheep wool to alpaca.
Any fiber, from common wool Himalayan Giant Nettles to Alpaca. And I take requests for custom spinning jobs.
About spinning: I begin by pulling the roving - that's a fancy term for spinnable wool - from the bag and set up at my Ashford Traveler wheel. After a few hours, there's quite a bit spin up nicely. At this state, it’s called a single. But the work doesn't stop there - I then have to wind the single off onto another bobbin and get ready for the next step.
Plying.
Plying is the process of finishing the yarn so that it will be hard to unravel, and so that it will not twist anything knit or woven out of it into spiral shapes. To ply I set up two or three filled bobbins on the Lazy Kate next to my feet, and feed the ends into the wheel once more, just like when I sit to spin. But now the wheel is turning the opposite way, so the energy built up in the fibers will hook the singles together.
You might wonder why I pause between to wind the single off, rather than simply swap the filled bobbin for an empty one and ply from the filled ones. Now the step between spinning and plying, wind-off, is critical. Yarn plied in reverse - which is to say, from the end I stopped at - will misbehave more while plying, and as it's worked later. It may also have thick or thin spots.
Wind-off is the process of transferring all that mass of yarn onto another bobbin, so that the end I began spinning it from will be the end on the outside, the one I feed into the wheel to begin the ply. In the process of winding off, over-energized spots relax and slack spots take up the extra, so the yarn is smoother all around. This prevents the high energy buildups called dragonflies, or snowmen.
Once it’s plied, I transfer it to a skein, tie up that skein, and soak the skein in boiling water for ten minutes. This sets the twist in place— after this it can be unraveled, but before this stage it will unravel, without any help form human fingers. I then hang it up somewhere out of the way and leave it to dry. Depending on the fiber and the humidity, this stage can take anywhere from hours to days. A few days later, I wind it into a ball, measure the yards, and consider it ready for sale or use.
A whole day can be spent doing nothing but this and pausing to eat. With my yarn, you know you’ve got something professionally made, with care in every step.

I also make beeswax candles. And I sell them too.