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.

Fifteen Minutes

Fifteen minutes is not a large portion of time to take out of your day, but it is really important in learning how to do a new skill. Especially if that skill involves nothing more than gaining muscle memory. Adults have the hardest time learning new skills simply because they can't remember having a difficult time learning how to do many things that we take for granted today. Such as learning how to walk or learning how to eat solid food. We simply can't remember what it took to learn how to do those things because of how our brains work, but because we have been doing them for so long we expect that everything should come as easily to us.

I have found that in the spinning community, beginners are discouraged from learning how to spin on "more challenging" fibers such as cotton and bamboo. When I first read about this as a beginner, it made me have the opposite knee-jerk reaction that many teenagers have. The "I can do anything that you tell me not to do" syndrome. I won't lie. I had a really hard time learning how to spin cotton and even gave it up for a while in favor of spinning wool. After all, I had just gotten a spinning wheel and I wanted to play with that instead of struggling with a little spindle and a bunch of raw cotton.

I came back to spinning cotton for the simple reason that I have eight ounces of the stuff plus some expensive hand carders that I haven't been using and four ounces of recycled sari silk and recycled denim waste. I have a lot of stuff for spinning cotton and I want to be able to use it.

So I decided to take to heart some advice that I read a long time ago: spin for fifteen minutes a day.

That fifteen minutes has become one of the most important parts of my day. Since I try to make my spinning time first thing in the morning right after I get out of bed, it has helped to focus me and relax me at the same time. I found that it helps me get into the same place that meditation or yoga would so I feel mentally stimulated and mentally relaxed at the same time.

And since I am getting lots of practice in, that fifteen minutes a day is also helping me even out my spinning. I find it so much easier to spin now that I have been working on my fiber preparation and my long draw for cotton. I even spun my first ever cotton single that didn't break when I wound it into a ball to get it off of my spindle. The only bad thing about spinning more cotton is that now it is the only thing I want to be spinning!

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.

It might be a small obsession...

Sunny Day Handspun

I swear I actually do have other things to talk about other than spinning. I have a pair of socks on the needles at the moment as well as a pair of silk fingerless mittens. You think that the allure of silk would help keep me away from the wheel.

It is just so relaxing to sit down and start spinning at a wheel. The activity is both productive and infinitely lazy. The feel of the wool slipping through your fingers and twisting into fine thread is highly rewarding because it is so magical. It is amazing how it holds together once you spread out a sheet of fiber so thin that it could fall apart, but before it does the twist shoots through the fiber and, suddenly, it is thread. When you think about it, there is no surprise that the ancient people made up myths and legends about spinning.

Purple Cabbage Handspun

I finished spinning, plying, and washing the pound of yellow roving that my parents got me for Christmas. It spun up to about a heavy worsted weight to a fingering weight, so it is slightly thick and thin. The skein at the front of the picture is slightly underplied while the skein in the back of the picture is slightly overplied, but that is just the learning curve of chain-plying using my wheel.They are also the biggest skeins that I have spun to date measuring in at about 100 yards per skein.

The little fiber batt that I got with my Golding is also spun up and plied. It has been done for a while now, but I didn't get around to washing it as quickly as I thought I would. The wheel played its part in distracting me. This skein is also chain-plied and is a nice fingering weight yarn. That means a two-ply with this spindle will be the perfect lace weight yarn that I am looking for.

Of course, my wheel only sat empty for about a day because I had misplaced my orifice hook. I had sat it down on my green armchair to get it out of the way when it fell off of my wheel and underneath a treadle when I was spinning. It turns out that the mahogany finish on the handle blended in perfectly with my fuzzy leopard print blanket on my chair and Sassy, a fat tabby cat, was sitting on it.

I am attempting to spin sock yarn out of the remaining Cherry Chocolate Chip batts that I got when I received my second spindle. I would like it to be a three-ply yarn, but I only have three bobbins. That means that I could either wind a plying ball to get the three-ply or I could do another chain-ply with one massive bobbin of singles.

The downside to the chain-ply is that the yarn will come out striping in some way again because the nature of the chain-plying tends to keep colors together. But the downside of winding a three-ply plying ball is to have an unequal amount of singles on any of the three bobbins and trying to deal with making a three-ply out of the leftovers or to chain-ply the leftovers anyway. That is the only reason why I haven't done a traditional three-ply yarn yet. I am not sure how to deal with the leftovers. So, I have to think about it and decide.

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.

King Cotton

Natural Brown Colored Cotton on Tahkli

Last year, I spent my Christmas money on a Learn to Spin Cotton kit from Cotton Clouds. I kept reading about how cotton wasn't easy for a beginner and how spinning cotton was hard because it was so short. I wanted to prove them wrong and show them that if I could spin cotton, then anybody could.

What I didn't want to admit was that I was having a hard time spinning cotton. My yarn was really, really thin. Instead of drifting apart, my singles would snap at the thin spots. When I put less twist in, the singles would drift apart. I was having a hard time with fiber management so I was having a difficult time plying the singles together to make thicker yarn. It was tough and eventually I gave up and went back to spinning the nice, shiny wool I had. I got to where I was spinning nice wool yarns and I was even getting down to a nice fingering weight yarn that I could make socks out of. I was satisfied with that, but I kept browsing my I SPIN COTTON! group on Ravelry. Everybody there was growing and spinning their own cotton and I wanted in on the fun.

Cotton Yarn Spun in 2011

I looked back at my cotton that I spun. Most of the cotton I spun from cotton sliver, green cotton sliver, brown cotton sliver, a pima cotton boll, and some pima cotton lint. I spun that all on my little tahkli. Only half of the cotton skeins I have are boiled, but they are all soft to the touch and I am proud that I have spun them.

But I think if I try again, I can do much better. I found the rest of my brown cotton sliver and I am spinning that on my tahkli. I now use a white ceramic bowl to spin on so I don't scratch the surface of any table and get a nice fast spin. I have found that I am getting a slightly more consistent yarn. My fingers are slowly learning how to spin cotton and they are picking it up quicker. I just have to ignore the feeling that I am going to lose control of the yarn at any time. And I keep dropping my spindle from time to time.

The cotton growing season is practically over up here in northeast PA, but I have some seeds that I am saving for next March. The seeds were still germinating this summer, but the squirrels and rabbits kept eating my seedlings. I have eight seeds left that I am hoping to grow. If I can just get one boll to grow on one plant, then I can get a new batch of cotton seeds to try again.