This Week in Spinning: Week 1

Taking a cue from my friend Jamie’s most excellent blog (highly recommended reading) I decided to start a weekly blogging project based on my yarn spinning. I don’t need to do it for motivational purposes — I’m pretty productive when it comes to spinning — but I thought it would be a great way to mark my own progress both creatively and in skill level. And it’s just kind of fun.

This weekend was actually pretty awful. For the first time in a while I had a weekend without any prior commitments, and I was going to spend early Saturday with the Eastside Spinner’s Guild and then head to work the rest of the day, and most of Sunday, so that I could bust through some work I need to get done for an upcoming deadline. But I woke up Saturday with an odd sense of motion sickness; I had some vague nausea and every time I moved my head it seemed to make it worse. As the morning went on it only got worse, and all I could do was lay down — any time I sat up I felt nauseous, and if I stood up my heart rate immediately skyrocketed and I felt like I was either going to faint or worse (you know, that nausea thing). I couldn’t read, I couldn’t spin, I couldn’t knit. I was trapped on the couch doing absolutely nothing, which is about the worst state to be in for me. I was horribly sick all night and didn’t begin to feel better until about three o’clock this morning. I decided to pass on going anywhere today since I was still pretty oogey-feeling when I got up and didn’t feel remotely normal until about five o’clock.

I still have no idea what made me so sick this weekend. Food poisoning, maybe? Who knows. But by late this afternoon I’d finally had enough of sitting around and doing nothing and I felt like I could at least finally spin without feeling like I was going to fall over, faint, or throw up (or all three simultaneously) and I sat down and did some spinning.

I had this idea for a project last week that would combine Firestar, a very shiny, lustrous nylon fiber spun very thin with salmon-colored, thickly-spun Blue-Faced Leicester. I really wanted to have the BFL ready to spin this weekend so I managed to squeeze in some dyeing this week late at night so the fiber would be dry by the weekend. I managed to get some time last weekend to spin a bobbin of the Firestar — I had bought two ounces of the stuff, one ounce in burnt orange and one ounce in bright yellow, and I carded them together to blend the colors. It was the first time I’d ever used Firestar and I found the fiber to be interesting — it’s definitely one that I want to use in combination with other fibers rather than on its own as it tends to feel a little strange in my hands, not being a natural fiber. But since I was planning to ply it with BFL that’s the way I wanted to spin it this time.

I spun the BFL in a nice, low-twist, thick single and loved how it came out. I’ve only spun BFL once before, and that was just a sample that another spinner gave me, but I really liked it. I chose BFL because it has a long staple length so I knew that I could spin it into a fat low-twist single pretty easily.

As I was spinning the BFL tonight and thinking about how I’d be plying it, I suddenly thought about adding beads to the Firestar single. Why not? I’d read about the idea of adding beads to spun yarn before but hadn’t actually tried it, and I knew I had some yellow and orange glass beads somewhere that would fit on the single. So I decided to give it a try.

I'm calling this 'Beaded Tomato.' Hey, it's the best I could do on the fly.

Spinning with beads is definitely a challenge, especially when the beads are so small that you have to actively push them down the single because their diameter doesn’t allow them to slide very easily. But the kinks in the yarn and the many times I had to sit and untwist tangled beads were well-worth the final product, I think. On hindsight I now think I should have chosen beads that contrasted more sharply with the yarn so that they stood out, but I still like the way it looks — they’re very subtle and they add a cool little bit of texture to the yarn.

A close-up showing the beads in the yarn.

This is the kind of project that, in my opinion, really shows how handspun yarn is such a worthy endeavor and how you can create things that you’ll simply never find in any store. I had enough beads to spin about half of the yarn — which only totalled about 60 yards — so all I need to do is pick up some more beads to finish the other half and I’ve got enough to probably knit a hat with or a small scarf. This project challenged me in several ways: first, in spinning with beads, something I’ve never done before and something that can open up some paths into creating art yarns, and secondly in spinning bulkier yarns. I never, ever spin bulky yarns because I generally hate them and feel like they’re such a waste of fiber, but I really liked how this came out and might be more open to spinning thicker yarns down the line.

If you want to check out more posts about what people are doing in fiber arts, check out Fiber Arts Friday at AlpacaFarmGirl’s blog!