Last week I did something I haven’t done in a year. I pulled out my spinning wheel! I had one bobbin full of singles, plus one bobbin with a bit spun on it, and a big mess of fibre that had just sat for a year. I had to do some weighing to figure out what I was trying to do with the yarn. I suspected I had meant to 2-ply it, but wanted to check just in case I had thought I’d 3-ply it and get back to Shuttleworks to buy more bobbins and a bigger lazy Kate so I could ply. Turns out I was smart about it, and only meant to 2-ply. So I got spinning!
I’ll admit, for the first little bit it was a little confusing. I flipped through a couple of my spinning books to remind myself about how it all worked, and from there the second bobbin of singles went quite quickly. The fibre was from The Thylacine, and started out as two shades of natural grey (very dark, and a lighter one) plus some sections dyed orange, and some dark red. I spun it into long lengths of colour, but never had any plan to match the colours up when plying.
Plying was an adventure, but I eventually remembered how to get the wheel to spin the other way (apart from treadling backwards, which I find hard to control my speed with). I took the bottom green band off and then put it back on twisted the other way. My manual says to twist the other green band, but I tried that, and it kept spinning clockwise.
I had no idea how well it was going to ply because one bobbin had been full and sitting there for a full year, while the other one was newly spun. It ended up being pretty easy, although I think I was so anxious about over-plying that I under-plied some parts, but oh well. The miraculous thing is that I had almost exactly the same amount of singles on each bobbin. I ran out of one bobbin with about 1 foot to go on the other bobbin. Who knows if I’ll ever get that close again!
In some spots it’s grey and red together, sometimes greys line up, sometimes the reds line up… I think it’ll be an interesting knit in a mixture of marled and striping.
After a bath, it looks quite nice! The plying evened out nicely, I only found one really underspun little section:
You can see it in the grey strand that’s on top of all the others. That bit is probably just under a metre long, and the rest is basically what you see in the background of that photo.
I’ve got about 254 metres of DK-ish yarn, so I think I’m going to make a little shawlette out of it. I want it to be mostly stockingette to show off the yarn. Using Ravelry’s advanced pattern search (love! So much love.) I think I’ll either do the Lazy Daisy Shawlette, or The Age of Brass and Steam. I’m so proud because it is the thinnest and most even I have ever spun.
My last handspun was pretty chunky:
That hat, BTW, is my go-to -30C hat. Love it.
It’s so much fun to be able to make the yarn I knit with, I just love the feeling. That hat makes me happy every time I put it on for that exact reason! Although a lot of people these days seem to be surprised that one ordinary person can make yarn. Most people see yarn as something you make into stuff, and never think of taking the process one more step backwards.
Actual conversation extract from when I was knitting this hat at work:
Them: Where’d you get the funky yarn?
Me: I spun it.
Them: Hahahahahaha…. oh you’re serious.
That was just one person at on that show though – that was actually a very fibre-friendly cast. One is an avid knitter, another’s parents own a woolen mill.
