Spinning: June 2006 Archives
First off, I just want to say thank you to everyone who bought my pattern. Y'all know how to make a girl feel both loved and creative. I'm thinking I might have to hold a contest sometime in the future to celebrate the event. But I haven't quite come up with the right idea yet.
At long last, I have finally finished spinning my madder/cochineal dyed Corriedale roving. I do love Corriedale, I love how it can go from lifeless seeming to delightfully sproingy with just a quick bath. I love how it feels when you spin it. i did not, unfortunately, love spinning this stuff. Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly happy with the result, but I would have liked it a lot better if I could have spun a consistant single from it. There were so many un-teasable clumps, little burrs of fiber and bits of VM that eventually I just gave up and decided that if this stuff wanted to be rustic, it was going to be rustic. It kind of took all the joy out of spinning it. By the end, I just wanted to be done with the stuff.
My initial desire was to create a 3 ply yarn. Which I did. But I ended up with 1 empty bobbin and 2 that were about 1/3rd of the way full, so I used those to make a 2 ply. And then I had some single left over on one bobbin. It seemed like a made-to-order blogging opportunity.
Thanks to my big bad Lendrum plying head and bobbin I have a 440 yard 3 ply skein. It's roughly DK weight (about 14 wpi) but it drifts into sport weight every now and again. 440 yards is definitely enough to do something with. After doing the washing-after-spinning thing I forgave this fiber a little bit for being such a pain to spin. It's great color and has lovely subtle heathery variations that make me think this yarn should do something that involves cables.
I even have a reasonable amount of the 2 ply skein -- about 200 yards of that (which makes it clear that somehow I didn't balance my bobbins very well). The single? Well, not very much left of that, which is okay, because I'm not exactly sure what I would do with more of that any way.
The more I spin 3 ply yarns, the more I like them. They are a bit more work than a two-ply, but I just love how they look. With a yarn like this, you get a lot more sense of depth and subtle heathering. Amazing that you can combine three scrawny looking singles to get a happy fluffy three-ply yarn. By the way, this picture is probably the best representation of the true color of the yarn.
When you look at it this way, it almost looks like professionally spun yarn. I keep picking it up off my desk to squeeze it and admire the gentle blending of the colors. This project has definitely re-inforced one thing for me: I like spinning mostly solid colored fiber. Up to this point, I haven't figured out any real good uses for some of my wild colored hand-painted stuff. What that means is that I'm accumulating more yarn (even if I am not buying much) but not doing anything with it.
But this? This I can imagine knitting into something. I've been wanting to make that Flower Basket Scarf from Interweave Knits that everyone was making a season or so ago. I'll have to do a test swatch, but I think this may knit up pretty close to the recommended gauge. And at 440 yards, I should have just enough -- if the pattern is to be trusted. I need something to get me really insprired to knit something besides socks...
One of the things I like about my house is the little balcony off the master bedroom that overlooks our "backyard" -- I put backyard in quotes because the backyard includes our deck and a rectangle of green and a garage. While the view may not be completely awe inspiring, I do like the fact that it is high enough up that I can come home from work and still enjoy some of the late afternoon sunshine.
It becomes even better when it's warm enough (but not too warm) for me to take my wheel out with me. Combined with my iPod and a good audio book, it is a wonderful way to watch the day fade out. What's on my bobbins these days? I'm working on spinning up the 8 ounces of cochineal/madder dyed Corriedale that I got from Handspun by Stefania at MS&W. It's nice fiber, but I'm finding quite a bit of VM in it, as well as a lot of short, burr-like fibers that don't make for spinning results as smooth as I'd like them. Because of that, I've decided that I'm going to go for a three-ply yarn rather than a two ply, in hopes that that will even things out a little bit more and leave me with a relatively nice skein or two of yarn to plan a winter project with.
A lovely winter color, I think. There's enough subtle variagation to give the final yarn depth, but it shouldn't do the striping business that I manage to get from most of my hand-dyed fiber. I've finished the first bobbin and am about half-way through with the second. I'm hoping that I can finish the second and third bobbin up so that I can give my dad a little plying demonstration when we go to Ann Arbor for Father's Day this weekend.
Today my spinning and the weather outside had a similar theme: they were both on the grey side of things. We really had one of those flat grey days where everything seems just a little bit duller and it's easy to move without really paying attention to things. I almost missed my bus stop coming back from downtown in the afternoon. One of those kinds of days.
My spinning, on the other hand, was a little more interesting. Even if the color theme was still a natural sheepy grey. Sheepy grey is a dynamic color, too me. Grey sheep usually seem to have all these wonderful variagations. And the Coopworth that Liz gifted Julie and I with was no exception.
I finsihed the single ply while we were in Michigan, but didn't hank it up on my niddy noddy until I got back to Chicago. Since I was planning to ply it from two ends of the same center pull ball, I decided to give it a bath to set the twist.
I plied the single after breakfast this morning to create 68 yards of simple 2 ply.
This Coopworth was interesting stuff. I had spun some Coopworth before (I know in the post I call it Corriedale, but now having spun both in natural form, I am pretty sure that it's Coopworth and not Corriedale), but it was Coopworth without any character, and I didn't much like spinning it. This stuff, however, was incredibly soft and lofty in the batt, and much nicer to spin, but it developed a less soft quality after I spun it. It also likes to grab onto itself -- you can see from the two ply picture that there's a bit of a halo. I think the adjective I would use to best describe it now would be "wiry". It's definitely has a lot of springiness in it, but it is not against the skin soft. I think it would make excellent outerwear, especially in this gorgeous natural tweedy grey. I could easily see a three ply of this yarn making a beautiful cabled sweater for a guy -- as long as he had a nice thick turtleneck underneath.
Another interesting note about this yarn. When I need to pause in my spinning, I usually wrap the single around the end of the orifice hook. When I did that with this fiber, even for just a few minutes while I prepared another bit of batt to spin from, I found that when I unwound the single, it had incredible memory for having been coiled. It was like the single now had a little coiled spring in it.
Thanks again to Liz for sharing something lovely with Julie and I. With what I have, I can definitely make a couple of swatches for a sheep breed blanket sampler that I am thinking about embarking on.
But it wasn't all grey around my house today.
My poor under sun-fed peony has finally provided me with some absolutely beautiful blooms. The color is so vivid and intense, it was the perfect pick-me-up this afternoon to take my camera out front and snap a few closeups. Nothing like a beautiful vivid color to chase the grey away!
