Persistent Knitter

I decided this weekend to "spin with a goal*".  I’ve been making little tiny skeins and really wanted to make some quantity!  I aimed for 2oz of yarn.  I didn’t care what yarn, of what type - just yarn.  I tried to let the fleece tell me what it wanted to be.

I ended up with this beautiful skein (approx 2.3 oz of yarn):

I wanted to do minimal preparation at this point, and just focus on the spinning itself.  I wasn’t having any fun with my unknown brown fleece rolags. I either don’t like the fleece or how it’s spinning, or didn’t prepare it right. It was just not working right.  Paraphrasing my friend Ingrid, "I just want to spin something simple, not fight it".  I decided to use Alice; a beautiful corriedale fleece.

The fleece was prepared with a drum carder (about a year ago. heh). I have a big plastic bin that had about 8 or so in it. I’ve been working my way through them slooooowly.  Since I wanted to get about 2oz, I weighed a batt to see approx how much was in each. I had more than enough, so was set to go.

Lately all my sheep to shawl spinning has been worsted style, straight from the lock; so I had to get my head abour doing a different type of draw. Being drum carded, a long draw woolen style would work best. Alice still has a bit of lanolin left in her, and when I started saturday morning it was a bit cold. I got out the hair dryer to warm up my hands and the fleece. A space heater would have worked better and been more efficient, but I didn’t have one. :)

I got into the swing of things easily.  Tearing off a strip of the batt, and drafting it out to be slightly thinner. I experimented a bit and tried drafting it out even thinner, but found I couldn’t prevent the twist from entering the drafting zone easily enough, and couldn’t keep consistent with the long draw method. It was actually better to have a slightly thicker bunch of fleece to spin from.

I can’t decide if the lanolin in the fleece or the preparation was helping me be more consistent. I think possibly a bit of both. The other unknown brown fleece I made rolags with had a lot more neps/noils in it. To really tell I need to card up some rolags with Alice and see how those spin.

I filled my bobbin about 3/4 full, and then weighed it. I zeroed out my scale with an empty bobbin first, so I could determine what the actual yarn weighed. I had exactly 2 oz of singles.  Freaky.

I decided to spin up a bit more singles so I could do a few samples for plying. I hadn’t yet decided how I was going to ply it. I was originally thinking 2 ply.  I sampled two options; two ply and a three ply.  The three ply seemed a better yarn to me, it was fuller and I didn’t have to over twist it to get the look I wanted.  Plus it had the added bonus that I didn’t have to spin any more singles because I can navajo ply it.

I’ve had problems when I’ve been navajo plying before - I’ve added too much twist, and even washing & setting the twist hasn’t seemed to get it under control.  (I have the backwards problem when doing singles; I don’t put enough twist in).  I decided to take a different approach. I switched to a smaller whorl on my wheel; and treadled really slow.  The single only broke twice the whole time I was plying, probably where I had made the yarn much too thin.  Not too bad! Now that it’s washed, I’m not even sure I can see where it broke at all.

Doing this kind of concentrated spinning has allowed me to learn quite a bit. How to do the long draw consistently (and sometimes not so consistently).  When navajo plying; trying to eliminate the bump when the yarn folds back on itself so it’s not as obvious how the yarn was plied together. 

I think my next concentrated spinning will be sheep to shawl. I may not have time before then to do anything else. I think I’ll end up doing more spinning from the lock.  I really love the way worsted style yarn is so smooth and I can make it more consistent (probably because I’ve done more spinning of that type than woolen style).

* My secret is that if the yarn came out good enough, there’s a handspun contest next month I might submit it to. Maybe. We’ll see.