So I've been practicing spinning. My real goal is to spin sock yarn, and I want it to be a 3-ply, so the singles will need to be pretty skinny to make that happen.
First step: getting the hang of the motions needed to spin. I had about three layers of blue mawata leftover from my sister's mittens, so I used that to just get the hang of spinning the spindle, and running the resulting twist into the fibres. I got a length of really unevenly spun silk as a result, but no harm, no foul - this is why I started with leftovers in the first place.
Next step: I had about 12 g of red mawata leftover from my mittens, so I kept practicing, trying to draft to produce skinny singles, with the goal of eventually plying it all into a 2-ply, mostly to get the hang of how plying works. I wasn't super careful about the quantities, and didn't divide what I had evenly - or maybe I did, and my spinning was just the difference, but once I'd plied them up I still had a goodly amount of one batch left. Maybe I'll try plying it with the blue, just to see what I get?
So, I spun my singles, let them rest at least overnight - didn't spin it all up in one go - and then plied what I had. Skeined it up, ran it under cool water to set the twist - which, by the way, I wouldn't do that way with wool! I took a risk because this was 100% silk, I didn't think there was any chance of accidental felting. I'll be gentler if there's wool in the mix!
Once it was dry I had this:
Not too shabby, right? It's thicker than my end goal - more of a sport-to-DK weight, with possibly some sections being worsted - and it's more variable than what I want to end up with, but it's still a stretch of perfectly serviceable yarn. Go me!
Next step: I ordered some hand-painted roving - go big or go home! And the vendor thoughtfully put a little sample of merino roving in the package, about 21 g. So, I figured that would be great for more practice - help me get used to working with actual wool, even though the roving I ordered is a superwash merino/nylon/bamboo blend, and I think the sample is non-superwash merino.
So, that sample is now all spun up into singles. I think I'll be able to try plying tomorrow.
I am excited.
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