I'm eager to try knitting with my handspun, and it occurred to me a few days ago that in order to get on that, I might want to finish up my batch. I needed to spin up the third singles of the second half of the batch, and then ply. So, I've been doing some spinning.
I took that picture last night, before I wound the finished yarn off the spindle and put it in water to set the twist. It's still drying.
Notice how full the spindle is. (Ignore the crap on the island in the upper corner; I thought I had that cropped out when I snapped the pic.) I selected this spindle not just because it's beautiful, but because a quick consultation of Knitty's guide to top-whorl drop spindles indicated that if I wanted to spin fingering weight yarn (which I do), I should use a 28 g / 1 oz spindle. This one is 0.9 oz. Spinning my singles is great, but as you might be able to tell, plying is a bit more challenging, as the spindle starts to get awkward to handle as the yarn accumulates to the full or overly-full stage I probably pushed it to. I noticed that when I was plying the first half of this fibre - spinning singles was no problem, but plying was a bit frustrating. I've been thinking that maybe I need to pick up a larger spindle to use for plying.
To be fair, there were other frustrations in plying that had nothing to do with the spindle, and more to do with my system for managing the singles that feed into my 3-ply - I'm using a caddy I asked Mister to 3D print for me, and I wind the singles using my ball winder, slip a piece of paper curved on itself to form a sort of tube into the middle, and then pop those onto the pegs of the caddy. There are two problems with this system. The first is that the cakes from the ball winder are a bit too wide - the caddy is designed to work with bobbins, and cakes are shorter and wider than bobbins, so the cakes interfere with each other as I try to unspool the singles. I can't space them out more on the caddy, since it only has four pegs, but I could maybe try orienting the cakes so that they don't all unspool in the same direction. As I kept plying, I noticed a second problem - even as the cakes got smaller and stopped jostling each other around, I still couldn't unspool smoothly, because the strands were catching on the edges of the slips of paper I used as tubes, where the two edges met.
I also noticed, even at the stage where I was spinning that third singles, that a lot of my spinning time is actually spent winding. Wind the spun singles onto the shaft of the spindle. Wind the completed singles off the spindle to empty it for the next round of spinning. Wind the plied yarn onto the shaft of the spindle. Wind the completed yarn off the spindle. Lots and lots of winding. I should be thinking of it as part of the process, but it's started to feel...inefficient. I want to spin, I'm not super interested in winding. At least, not winding by hand. Using the ball winder is pretty fun, but that won't work for the winding that needs to happen during the drop spindle spinning process.
Still. It's pretty nifty that I made yarn using a stick.
Comments
Post a Comment