Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Spinning and more spinning

I have been spinning. and spinning. and spinning. I think it's because i'm still trying to decide if i like the pooling on the pirate sock, or if i should rip back and do it with 4 less stitches. While I ponder that you can see the pretty fiber.



That's some angora (done spinning) and the blue superwash colonial wool. I got the wool from Ashabee's Creations etsy shop. I split the 4 oz I had, and ended up spinning just over 2 oz. I then winded up a 2 ply ball, I did this before spinning them together because they kept curling up and I wanted to make sure they would play nicely together. I am now spinning that ball... maybe yarn pictures within the next day or two, and then I just need to pick a pattern. (This is moving fast because I have given it priority - trying to finish it by the end of June - and then maybe one for me - this one is not - by the end of the summer?)


I also decided to do the latest Sunday-Spin-a-Long exercise. The goal was to create some crinkly homespun yarn. I did up a 30 yard sample. Some of the time it just looks uneven, but at least some of the time I feel like I got it. I understood. and it worked.


You start with two ply of yarn - one thin, one thick... I think I want to try it again, as I was having a hard time getting thick yarn, and I can tell it turned out much better when the yarn was consistently thick for a while.



While plying I played with different tensions - it seemed to work best when I held the thick yarn lightly, and the thin yarn a bit tighter. The part that helped the most in her tutorial was that we didn't want to hold it taut and smooth while plying.



Like I said, trying to relearn to spin thicker didn't work so well with this project, but I got the taste of it, and once I'm done plying for the shawl, I think I want to try again!



...but it is pretty and was lots of fun to try!

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