Saturday, January 24, 2009

Plying some of my first wheelspun yarn




My awesome Fricke spinning wheel came with a bunch of different rovings for me to play with. I spun up a single of some Romney wool roving in natural brown, which I found to be very sticky and rough. Then I decided to experiment. I blended a bit of combed alpaca top in black with some merino/tencel top in teal. I just pulled apart the top and drafted the two colors together. This stuff was weird to spin because it was so slippery. I wanted to spin very thin singles so I went down a whorl size to add more twist, but it was tricky to find the right breakband resistance so the yarn would wind on before too much twist was added. The first singles were way overtwisted, but I was eventually able to draft fast enough to keep up with the twist. Neither the Romney, nor the alpaca/merino/tencel blend were enough to knit anything with, so I decided to practice plying with these singles. The result is this totally bizarre looking brown/black/teal blend, but the texture is interesting. I'm still plying right now. It will be interesting to see how the yarn turns out after I wash it to set the twist. I wonder what kind of bloom there will be, if any.

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