Silversmithing and jewelry class

I made a ring today in the Cambridge Center for Adult Education's intro to jewelry class--it's many weeks' worth of material crammed into two 6.5-hour long Saturday sessions. I'm learning lots of cool stuff--some stuff that I can't really use until I invest in some more equipment, but some stuff that I can use right away. It's pretty cool :)

(I of course had to texture my first ring with the traditional message a programmer displays for their first foray into a new language!)

Yarn!

Spinning! Yarn! I've made more of it with my drop spindle and it totally looks like real yarn.



From left to right: 2-ply wool (the dyed strand is from roving that came pre-dyed in those colors); Navajo 3-ply tussah/merino; and a swatch knitted with said 3-ply. I kind of want to make a knitted version of this hat from the 3-ply with some as-yet-nonexistent colorful/wacky handspun stuff for stripes, but I'll need to do some calculating first to make sure there's enough. I haven't yet decided what I'm doing with the 2-ply; the colors are kind of cool but also kind of terrifyingly retro. (I'm half-jokingly calling it "The Last Juniper" in my head--there's no good reason to reference The Last Unicorn, but the colors *are* pretty juniper-ish.)

Still haven't gotten around to dyeing this two-color stuff purple. It may need to wait until after the move.