Andean Inspired

When I first started spinning, I didn't want to spin two different singles and ply them together to make a two ply. I was afraid they would be different lengths and I would have waste. So I learned how to make a plying bracelet and Andean ply. Similar to chain plying (one single into three) it takes one single and lets you ply it against itself to make a two ply.

I wanted to do something similar with the last (and oldest) of my cotton singles. But with the plying bracelet, your project is stuck on your wrist and you are generally committed to spinning the entire thing in one go. I didn't want to do that. So I took my nostepinne and wound a center pull ball on it with my singles.

It was fantastic! The cotton didn't collapse onto itself when I was spinning and I was getting a nice two ply out of the tiny singles. Everything was going just fine for a while until I put it down and came back to it two nights later. The center of the ball had collapsed the next time I sat down to work on it and I didn't notice it until I was getting massive tangles.

Well, after the third tangle I was annoyed and decided to jam the center pull ball on my finger. I found the middle (where one end was feeding out) and popped my finger in there. I started out on my pinky, but eventually decided that my pointer finger gave me the best control of the yarn.

It worked.

Having a temper tantrum and deciding that it wasn't worth struggling anymore actually worked. I was able to control the inner and outer yarns better and got the rest of the yarn plied up onto my spindle. And best of all, I had no more breaking problems with either of the singles (they came before my cotton practice).

The tangle of singles beside my spindle was the only bit of cotton I lost from that batch. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that much yardage. I would have been more annoyed if I had just given up and thrown the rest of the ball away.

Now I have three skeins of cotton all spun up and waiting for me to finish spinning my cotton/denim blend. Then they will be going to the boiling pot so I can try my hand at actually finishing cotton properly. Since all of the cotton I have spun is naturally white, it won't be changing colors like colored cotton, but it will get all the wax off so it will be absorbent. And I will see if my artist ink is colorfast or not. Then I will have four little skeins of cotton ready to be knit with.

Neglected Spindles

I have been neglecting my poor half-finished projects on my spindles ever since I've really started spinning on my wheel. Yes, the wheel is a whole lot faster than my spindles, but I feel like I have gotten more spinning done in two days than I did using my wheel. (Which is wrong considering I just did a wheel plying session in two days, but if I used my spindles consistently, I might be getting more done.)

This is a lovely Chameleon Colorways BFL roving that my friend got me in 2012. If my Ravelry page is to be believed, I have been spinning on this since 2012 as well with big breaks in between steps. The colorway name is called Briar Rose. It has red, magenta, a yellow, and brown in the mix. Since I am chain plying it, the colors will probably be mostly separated from each other, but I'm letting them marl as they come up. This will hopefully provide some depth in the color transitions. Especially in the ones from red to magenta to the yellow.

The singles in my plying ball are at least a year old so the twist is long set in them. This is making plying interesting since I'm not really sure how much twist is supposed to go in as I am plying. I do know that I like a nice hard ply in most of my fingering weight yarns, so I am plying this pretty hard. Hopefully, this won't be like the laceweight I just plied that turned out underplied in spots and has to go through to get more twist in again.

I still have two-thirds of the roving she gave me. I was going to spin for a true three-ply, but then I got my wheel and I really want to spin the rest of it on my wheel. Some people defend spindles with all their might and I do love my spindles, but my spinning time is at a premium at the moment, so I'm going with the speed of my wheel instead of the portability of my spindles.

My goal is to get all of my SIPs (spinning in progress) done by the end of August. That leaves me with one skein to re-run through my wheel, this batch of singles to finish plying, and the rest of my silk hankie to spin up and ply. I think that is a reasonable goal.

The Blank Page Syndrome

This happens to me each time that I sit down to write up a blog post recently. I end up staring at a blank page on the computer screen trying to figure out how to write down what I have been doing. The trick is that I have actually been pretty busy living life and so much has happened that I simply don't know how to share it coherently with others.

For instance, last weekend my aunt and uncle visited my family and we went to go see the boulder fields. It is exactly what you would expect and nothing like you have seen. It is a lake of giant boulders. I actually went out a little ways on the giant rocks and I am so proud of myself. When I was younger, you couldn't have paid me enough to go out as far as I did (and that even took a while still). It is a great test of dexterity and balance.

I finished and have been wearing my Wishing for Spring green socks! I love them to death. They are my only pair of hand knit socks at the moment because I have officially retired my Hermione's Everyday Socks and my Blueberry Waffle socks. It has been so long since I've actually had a pair of KP Felici socks that I forgot how wonderful they are on your feet. And ever since I have been washing them with Soak, they have been even softer. Luckily, they seem to be holding up well at the gauge I knit them in and the garter stitch ribbing is so easy to do that it might become my go-to no-thought sock pattern for a while.

My beloved Kromski Sonata has also been dragged out and put to work. I have successfully finished spinning 8 oz of light brown alpaca lace weight. It is drying in the bathroom and will hopefully be completely dry by tomorrow so I can re-skein it and get an accurate yardage on it. I am hoping to make an aeolian shawl out of it, but the yardage will determine what I make. Besides, I have to finish my juice box socks and my friend's wedding shawl first.

So, I guess the next time I am sitting down staring at a blank page, I just need to start writing. After this little block, my planned posts should go smoothly and we can really get some good times going on in my little corner of the internet.

Sick Day

I haven't been feeling too well for the past couple of days, so I finally went to the doctor and they basically put me on a lot of medicines. Then my mom (who works at the doctor's office that I go to) ended up calling in another medicine for me to take care of my cough and to hopefully get me feeling much better. Apparently, I am a strange person so that medicine makes me really tired so I have been sleeping a lot.

I have managed to get some spinning done and I have done my first chain-ply on my spinning wheel! Plying on a wheel goes by really quickly compared to the spindle. The yarn both twists and goes onto the bobbin simultaneously. It is really awesome. Of course, I have watched some videos on chain-plying on the wheel after I got the second bobbin halfway plied, so I think the second half of the second bobbin is more tightly plied than the first bobbin. I will find out after I wash and dry the second bobbin since I just finished that one tonight and I am giving it a night to rest of the bobbin before I wind it up on my niddy-noddy.

I talked about having cotton on my Golding in my last blog post, but I really like spinning it! I hate how people say that spinning cotton is so hard when it is so easy to spin. Cotton fibers are shorter than wool fibers, but they almost want to spin themselves. It does feel really different than wool, so that is probably what scares people off.

The last thing I have been doing is watching a few videos about spinning flax into linen. It is so fascinating to watch. The best videos I have found are done by the guys at the Hermitage. If you watch the videos, then you will understand where the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale came from because it really does like you are taking straw and turning it into gold. I think it would be fun to try growing my own flax to turn it into linen, but I think I need to go shopping at their store first and get some flax to see if I even like spinning it in the first place. Then if I do I will have to convince my dad to help me make my own processing tools. The only trouble would be the hackles, but I will cross that bridge when I get there. Right now I will probably be sticking to cotton.

Spinning Frenzy

I have been quiet lately because all of my projects have been at a relative stand-still since I finished my blanket. I just haven't been wanting to do anything. I recently discovered that not only do I have allergies, but I am apparently allergic to dogs, cats, the native plants in the North East US, both types of dust mites, and I have a new and growing allergy to peanuts. Things have been a little rough around here while we try to figure out how to control my allergies.

Luckily, I am not sensitive to wool or lanolin which means I have been spinning my heart out. I finished spinning all of my Buckleberry fiber and I am on the second day of plying. I did decide to stay with my original idea to n-ply and the yarn is coming out lovely. It is just about the perfect weight to be a three-ply sock yarn. The only trouble is that I seem to want to fit all of my singles onto one spindle. At first it was going quite well until I finished up today's spinning session. A few hours later and my left arm is really starting to hurt. I am taking a break from it for now to see if the pain persists. If it does, I have stressed my muscles past their breaking point and my spindle is really too heavy to fit the rest on. I have dreams of a nice fat skein, but I might have to break it into two skeins.

My birthday is coming up in a couple of months and one of the things I don't have for spinning is a yarn scale. KnitPicks has a very nice yarn scale that I would really love to have. All I know is that my mom is planning something and she knows that I need a yarn scale, swift, wool hand carders, and cotton hand carders. I need to be patient and see if I get lucky. She is my mom and I will love anything that she surprises me with, but I am very curious to what she is planning. If I do get a yarn scale and I still have the yarn not knitted up, I will have to weigh it and see how much of that fiber was left. I have this feeling that I managed to spin more than 4 oz.

Spinning Update

Taken with Instagram

It feels like forever since I last talked about my spinning, but it wasn't really that long ago. In one week I managed to spin enough yarn to make my spindle heavy enough for me to wind it off onto a bobbin and start loading up the spindle again.

This bobbin is special to me. I found it at a flea market when I was visiting my fiancee's father's house. All I know about it is that it is an old bobbin that had mill-end yarn on it. I assume that it is a part of a very old textile factory that had been out of service for a while. Or possibly updated. It looked like the vendor had saved these bobbins from someplace. The yarn on the bobbins wasn't very good and one of the colors was actually drifting apart because it wasn't spun very solidly.

I got three of these bobbins for handspinning. Even if I do get a wheel one of these days and have lots of extra wheel bobbins to wind on, I might still use these because they just look cool. Old fashioned and full of history. Plus, the bobbin matches my spindle nicely right now. It is difficult to wind onto, but I think that is because I have never wound onto a bobbin before. I always wound it up into a ball. I like displaying them on bobbins though and I'll just wind it into a plying ball later. Either that or the bobbins will be so annoying to me that I will just display them and never use them again. We will see what ends up happening.

This is the last half of the fiber I have been spinning. I decided that I am going to spin it into one continuous thread and N-ply the thread to get a three-ply yarn. I am pretty sure that it will turn out into a perfect sock weight yarn. The N-ply will also preserve any color changes that I am getting in the yarn, so I have a feeling that I will get a striping yarn. I will see when I get it done.

Sunday Spinning!

Taken with Instagram

“I know that spinning sets me in a trance; it soothes me and charges my batteries at the same time. When times are tough I sit down to spin during the news-broadcasts, with therapeutic results.”
― Elizabeth Zimmermann, Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac

I first started to get interested in spinning when I got interested in knitting socks. I have been trying to get enough yarn spun so that I could finally have a pair of handspun socks. First the yarn was too thick. Then the yarn was perfect, but I just didn't have enough of it to make a pair of socks without a coordinating color. So, I am trying again.

I am spinning up the rest of the KnitPicker Corriedale fiber in the Buckleberry colorway. I love how this yarn is turning out to be. It is mostly blue with shots of purple in the single. I am planning on spinning it all up and then N-plying the single. The fiber in the picture is only half of the remaining fiber left. I just split it up into smaller and more manageable bundles before I started to spin it.

I was so focused on trying to make it into the perfect sock yarn that I put it down for a long time. I had to admit to myself that I wouldn't spin if I was so focused on the end product that it would suck the joy of spinning out for me. Spinning is soothing and magical in how it works. It shouldn't be something that I obsess over. I have enough things to worry about in my life. Spinning is relaxing and it should be fun to do too. So I am now spinning it up as my default weight which will end up being a good three-ply sock yarn anyway.