Spinning Experiment

I got a package the other day. It was some wool I bought from Skeinwinder 123 on Etsy. It is so nice and pretty.

This one is BFL in a colorway called Rainbow Soup.

And this one is merino in the colorway Midnight Zephyr (I like these names).

My original plan when I bought them was to simply spin the two together into a 2-ply. Probably sock weight or worsted weight. But when I laid the two big braids or wool next to each other I was starting to have doubts about whether I'd like the result.

Time to spin and swatch...

It was super overcast when I took these photos so the colors are weird but you can at least get an idea...

The 1st swatch (on the left) is a single of each wool spun in to a 2-ply yarn. It's okay but I don't love it.

The middle swatch is a 2-ply made with one strand of the Rainbow Soup BFL and one strand of wool in a Lemon-Lime color. This one looked really cool as yarn but when I knit it up I really didn't like the resulting fabric. Too much contrast.

And lastly, the swatch on the right, one strand of the Rainbow BFL Navajo-plied (making it a 3-ply yarn). This one was the winner! This method involves spinning one extra thin yarn and then sort of hand crocheting it. It takes quite a bit longer that a normal 2-ply, which explains why this swatch is so much smaller, but the result is that you get to see more crisp color transitions.

So I spun and spun and spun and I'm not done yet but here's a taste of the prettiness.

See how certain colors really pop? Like the yellow and red? That's why navajo-plying is so neat. You really get to see those colors.

I think this yarn might end up as a pair of mittens. And I'll think of something to do with that big lump of merino later.

Do you spin yarn? Do you like reading about the process I use to decide what I make? Let me know what you think!

Summer Spinning

It is hot.

Really hot.

And I don't have air conditioning.

I wouldn't mind so much except for that most of the things I like to do require a cooler atmosphere; knitting and spinning is hard to do with sweaty hands and fingers, and cooking or baking is no fun because it makes the apartment even hotter... Hmm, what to do...

Well, I was home alone the other night and bored and just needed to make something. I got out some wool, hand carders, and the spinning wheel. Then I directed both of my fans directly at my body and got to work.

I pulled out some bright rainbow merino wool I bought and experimented with a while back. The yarn I was getting from this wool was pretty but just too bright for my taste and it's just been sitting in a basket. You can read more about it here.

Then I found some alpaca that I had forgotten about. I decided to try blending it with the merino to (hopefully) create more pastel-type colors.

My mom gave me some hand carders for christmas and they're really fun for this sort of thing. And when I use them I get to feel all old-timey. I laid strips of the white alpaca down first and then layered the rainbow merino on top and got to carding.

The result was these lovely pastel fluffy puffs. Cute!

They kind of reminded me of little sea creatures. Then it was time to spin them up! I love working on the spinning wheel...

Here's the thin single I spun up first. I used all the fiber on this single then wound it into a center-pull ball. I love this technique when spinning small amounts of fiber because nothing goes to waste. You do this by taking the yarn end from the center of the ball and spinning it together with the outside yarn end from that same ball (and don't forget to spin the wheel in the opposite direction of the single). Does that make sense? If you want to try this you can email me and I'll explain it better (the heat is frying my brain a little bit right now).

And here it is! A soft and squishy 2-ply merino/alpaca yarn. And it's in sweet pastel colors that I'll actually want to knit with! Hooray. I'm thinking I'll use it to make part of a hat but we'll see. I'm excited to see how it knits up.

I hope you enjoyed seeing how I made this fiber into yarn... Because I really liked doing it.

I Love Merino

This past Saturday I sat myself down with 4 ounces of beautiful merino wool from Halfday. A couple (maybe more) hours later, I had in my hands the best and prettiest yarn I've ever made. It's squishy and soft in pastels and light browns and I'm kind of in love with it.