Thoughts on Pencil Rovings

I have to preface this post with "I am not an expert". I got a couple of questions about the Crown Mountain Farms pencil roving and how to spin it and I thought I would share my experiences. Like all things related to spinning, my experience could be different than yours. But I hope my answers help provide a framework for identifying whether this fiber could be for you or not.

Carole of Carole Knits asks:

Have you spun with pencil roving before? I've been wanting to try it and I'm anxious to hear about your experience.

I most certainly have! In fact, I spun a whole 8 ounce corriedale pencil roving from Crown Mountain Farms, which is why I decided to buy more for another project. I have no idea where Teyani gets her rovings from, but I think they are fabulous. And the way she does her dyeing is also exceptional. There are no felted areas, no strangely textured areas, and the stuff looks and feels exactly like what I expect corriedale to feel like. When I spun up the first batch, I just did a little pre-drafting to loosen things up, but I really didn't have to do anything else. This stuff is very easy to spin fine, but if you wanted a thicker yarn or ply, that would be easy to do, too.

This is the only pencil roving that I've ever spun, so I can't speak for other folks who sell it, but I wills say that I was happy enough about this stuff to buy more. And life is way to short to buy more of a fiber you don't like!

Elizabeth of Trailing Yarn asks:

I have a question for you. When you spin the pencil rovings, do you split them again, or just spin them as they are (after predrafting, if you do that)? If you were spinning it on a spindle rather than a wheel, would that effect whether or not you split the roving again?

When I spun the pencil roving I mentioned above, I spun it on a wheel and I did not split the fiber. Part of that had to do with wanting to get longer stretches of color in my singles. In general, most of the roving was about the thickness I would split thicker rovings down into, so I really didn't feel the need to split it down any further. I don't think I would change my strategy if I were using a drop spindle (or a wheel), unless I wanted to create a very fine single or I wanted to make the stretches of color shorter.

String of Stringthing's House of Knitting asked:

I have been considering getting that color roving in a while, but I was worried that it might be really pink instead of red, and I am not a pink fan. Does yours seem pretty saturated with red?

I can definitely vouch for the redness of this roving. It is 100% deep saturated red. Because I took the picture of the roving in the direct sun, it gets a more tomato-y red cast, but its more of a true red, that, if anything, has bluish undertones. The darker areas have a bit of a blood-red cast. Definitely no pink to be found. There are, however, short stretches of white and lighter red areas, which I love, because I think they will give the final yarn more depth without reading "I am screamingly variagated". I don't expect those areas to read pink. Given previous experience, I expect them to read faded red.

And Opal of Akamai Knitter (who I am extremely jealous of because she lives near Honolulu, Hawaii... I miss Hawaii already!) comments:

I'd be interested in learning more about the process of spinning with pencil roving. I can really see that roving as a gorgeous lace shawl as well.

I'll try to blog about it as much as I can, although I am not sure I do anything differently than when I spin regular rovings. But I'll try to give y'all some closeups of the roving, and a better idea of it's thickness pre- and post-drafting.

As far as the final project, because I want to turn it into a shawl, I'm going to plan for a two-ply yarn. Two-plies lay flatter than three plies and work better for showing off the two dimensional patterns that you find in lace. I haven't decided yet whether I am going to spin a single ply from each roving and then combine them into a two ply yarn, or whether I will split each roving in half and ply the two halves together. I'm leaning towards the first option, because that would definitely minimize any differences that might show up between the two bales (for instance, one might have a lot more white than the other) of roving and help create yarn with a more coherent look, which I think would be better for a shawl where I want the lace to be the as prominent as the yarn and I don't want people to focus on unintended dramatic differences in the colors of the skeins of yarn I was using and I really really don't want to knit from two skeins at once.

Having said all that, it will probably be a little while before I get to this stuff. I want to finish spinning the Hang on Sloopy superwash merino (also CMF fiber) and get enough of "My Boyfriend's Back" superwash merino (yes, still CMF) spun and plied so that I can start John's next pair of socks around Christmas. And then there's that 2 lbs of moorit CVM that I'm working my way through. I'll have more on that tomorrow.

And just in case you knitters think that there is no way you could possibly use a pencil roving... you just need to think of pencil rovings as really big, very untwisted yarn. The 8 ounce bundles are actually 175 yard long, all stretched out! If you were careful, you could easily knit with it and you can most certainly felt with it. I've been thinking about how cool it would be to make some felted bowls out of it (there was a Spin Off article a couple of years back that talks about how to do this) or perhaps even a throw pillow cover or two or a very loosely woven, felted scarf.