Spinning Socks
January 21st, 2009 at 11:08 am (socks, spinning)
I have acquired quite a bit of superwash merino roving in the past year or so. In an attempt to use it up (and then get to knit fabulous socks out of it) I’m working on spinning more sock yarn.
This roving started out as two 4 ounce bumps; the colorway is Water Lilies from the Loopy Ewe ( here). Because it’s a duo, you have two strands of roving in each pack, each one a different color. In this case it was blue/purple and purple/green.
this means I had 50% of blue/purple and 50% purple/green. This presents a problem when you want to make a three ply sock yarn with even color distribution. I had thought I’d just split it all in thirds; but didn’t like breaking the green off so it’d be only in part of one of the plys. I have other roving from this same dyer; and found a pile of blue/purlple that matched that I hadn’t used yet.
Are you with me? I’m lost too.
Each bag in the picture represents one ply of a three ply yarn. Two of those plies will be blue and purple. (those are in the back of the picture). The third ply will be the green/purple. I divided them by weight +/- .1 ounce.
Because I added more roving to the pile, I will end up with 12+ ounces of sock yarn. I can normally knit a pair of socks from 4 ounces of my handspun. So I’ll either knit 2 pairs plus a small pair (maybe for one of my kids) or one pair plus something else. Actually I seem to remember each bag weighing around 5 ounces. This is going to be a LOT of sock yarn :)
