Making Stuff, Week 13: A Spinning Break

Another Friday, and another entry for WonderWhyGal’s Fiber Arts Friday! We’re coming in for the landing at work on our project (Monday Night Combat – don’t forget to check it out!) so my time is limited for a little while. And when I don’t have much time to spin or knit I pick my projects carefully to maximize my sense of accomplishment in a short amount of time. So instead of doing any spinning this week I took a little break and decided I needed to do some knitting with my own handspun, a nice, small project that I could take to work and get done quickly. And since I had spun my Silverton Sage yarn for just such a project, I went ahead and cast it on.

Silverton Sage being knit into the Duet hat/scarf from Knitty.com.

So far I’m pretty happy with it. I do have a couple of criticisms of my work, however — first, I overspun the yarn just every so slightly. I got a little overzealous, I think, in wanting a bouncy 3-ply yarn, and I probably should have run it back through the wheel to unwind it a little bit, but honestly it’s not that bad. Second, I’m wondering if a 2-ply yarn would have worked better for this stitch pattern. The general rule of thumb is that if you’re knitting with cables or any other textured stitch that needs to pop, you use a 3-ply, and for any lace pattern you use a 2-ply. This pattern has no cables but it struck me as not quite lacy enough to qualify as lace, so I chose a 3-ply. And it does look nice, I think, but part of me wants to make the same yarn in a 2-ply, knit the same pattern, and then compare. That’s not likely to happen but who knows? I just have a few more rows to do and it’s done, so I just need to pick up a couple of buttons and a ribbon to finish the whole deal.

I also managed to find a few minutes this week to try a new beaded yarn — two plies of undyed Corriedale plied with one strand of silver thread and reddish-orange glass beads. I’m very, very happy with this and I just need to get more beads to finish the bobbins of Corriedale I have…a lot more beads. A ton, apparently, because with two packages of beads this only amounted to about 50 yards. Wow. I haven’t come up with a name for this one yet. Any takers? When I finish plying the rest this is one that will definitely go up in the Etsy shop.

A new Corriedale beaded yarn.

And finally, a quick cellphone shot of the dyed Blue-Faced Leicester/Benz Alpaca/Nylon sock blend, because my camera’s battery ran out.

Dyed BFL/alpaca/nylon waiting to be spun into sock yarn.

The color inspiration for this yarn goes to Glorious Grazer’s Facebook Fan Erica Palmer, who suggested a purple with a rich red when I put the call out to name your own colors. I love how they came out, so thank you, Erica! This will be the next spinning project, and I’ve already learned something about how I want to produce the next BFL/alpaca/nylon blend: I’m going to try carding it rather than blending it on the hackle. I know that carding technically produces a woolen yarn rather than a worsted, and you want a worsted for socks typically. But blending on the hackle removes so much BFL from the blend that I lose a lot of the fiber, and I’m willing to take well-prepared rovings, blend it on the carder, and spin it semi-worsted in order to get a bouncier yarn with more BFL fiber content. So that’s the next blending project.

Spinning Terms: “Worsted” and “Woolen”
There are two main types of yarn produced by spinning: worsted and woolen. These two terms mark the ends of a spectrum, with semi-worsted and semi-woolen in between. A pure worsted yarn is one in which the longest and strongest fibers have been processed into top and then spun with a short draw, producing a tight, well-aligned, lustrous and strong fiber. A pure woolen yarn is one in which the fibers have been carded and not necessarily aligned (and sometimes purposefully misaligned) and then spun with a long draw, producing an airy, fluffy yarn. Varying these techniques can produce semi-woolen or semi-worsted yarns.

And that’s it! Don’t forget to check out all the other great Fiber Arts Friday posts. Next week I’m hoping to have enough time to spin up that lovely BFL/alpaca/nylon blend (and by the way, I’ve come up with a less cumbersome name for that blend: “Cosy Toes”), and if the weather keeps going the way it is here I’ll be able to wear my hat as soon as I cast it off tonight.