15. December 2009 14:39
by Jobo
3 Comments
After spending much time trying to hone my spinning skills to be able to spin thinner and thinner singles… I thought I should shake things up and see if I could spin some chunky yarns too! It has been said that after one has learner to spin fine that thick can be challenging, so I was expecting this to be an interesting spin, and likely a fast one – since fatter singles would use up a braid of roving much faster than drawing it out into an infinitely tiny thread!
I decided to make a mostly white braid, using a technique from the “Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook” where you apply drips and splotches of dye onto pre-soaked roving in a cold pour method. I literally soaked my Merino Top until it was thoroughly wet (2 hours or so) and then spread it out on plastic wrap and then used a syringe to apply little droplets of purple and teal green over the wool and then steamed in the wrap in the microwave for a bit. The result was a blend of purpley / bluey dotted roving, which as suspected yielded a pastel blend yarn.
Don’t you wish this was Scratch-N-SQUISH!!?
I tried to spin a consistant, fatter than usual, low twist single. I used the attachments for my wheel that would give the lightest possible amount of twist, and specifically watched my technique to make sure I was not holding on too long to the forming yarn and making the twist too tight. (for you spinners-in-waiting aka the not-yet-addicted remember that fat singles don’t need as much twist to hold themselves together as thin tiny ones) The result is a very soft, very large and poofy skein of yarn that looks like it would be really heavy, but is actually a lot lighter than it looks.
You can tell in the close up, my spinning is a little bit uneven, but you can see the airyness and lightness of the finished yarn. The blues and purples blend together and mix with the often whitish single and make a watercolor-style blend. I spun the sections of color randomly, so the colors come and go at will. The finished 2 ply yarn averages out at approximately 7-8 WPI (so fairly chunky) and from the 5 ounces I dyed, I yielded almost 300 yards! So that’s actually enough yarn to make an actual project… hmmmm what to make.
Any ideas anyone?