I began work on the “Cozy Toes” blue-green blend that I carded up a few weeks ago. I’m absolutely loving these colors so far. The picture does some justice but honestly, you really just have to see it in person to feel that color pop.

Blue-faced Leicester/alpaca/nylon Cozy Toes single. One bobbin down, two more to go.

I’m anxious to move on to the other two bobbins, but I just love walking by my wheel and seeing that color spring out like that. I’m three-plying it traditionally, no chain-plying. While chain-plying would retain the color bands that’s actually not really what I’m after — I’m looking forward to a more impressionist-painting look (I hope) to the resulting strands all intertwining.

Most of the time these days I spin intentionally; I set out to create a very specific yarn for very specific projects and it’s actually pretty unusual for me to find myself wanting to spin something just to see what I get. But that’s exactly what I did with the green meriboo/Benz alpaca/white merino/silk blend I carded up and spun as a two-ply fingering weight. I just wanted to see what I’d get and wow, I’m really happy with the results.

A meriboo/Benz alpaca/white merino/silk 2-ply fingering weight yarn. Just my color!

On the surface it probably doesn’t seem much different from the Silverton Sage yarn I spun up a few weeks ago, but it’s actually quite different. It’s softer (incredibly soft, in fact) as it’s a flatter 2-ply yarn and not the slightly-overspun, round 3-ply yarn that Silverton Sage is. It’s also a fingering weight yarn so it’s a much lighter gauge. And the color is a bit darker and more gray, which I really like. I’m finding the blends I’m creating with Benz’s black fleece to almost be the most interesting blends because the addition of some of his black fleece in the right quantity does things I don’t really expect. As a UI designer my color work has always been on a monitor; I have virtually no experience with painting. But paints are what fiber and dye combinations mimic and it’s been fun to see how the addition of some black can take a color and really pop it rather than mute or darken it a whole lot.

As you can see, I was so anxious to knit with this that I didn’t even take a proper picture of the loose, tasty hank before I wound it up for knitting. I’ve decided to knit the Marmalade Shawl with it as I ended up with a scrumptious 300 yards (practically on the nose). I’m planning on it being a bit smaller, more of a loose-mess triangular scarf around the neck. That’s if I can get past the cast on, which I fussed with late last night and had to rip out as I found it a touch confusing.

So, not much in the way of quantity this week but I think I’ve more than made up for it in color, don’t you think? I’m anticipating having a little bit more time soon to finish this yarn and I’m really motivated now to do that. But in the meantime, why not go check out the other Fiber Friday posts at Wonder Why Gal’s blog?

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.

Turns out I’d gotten a stomach virus, probably picked up while I was at the Cues & Tattoos festival in Seattle this weekend, surrounded by lots of people, many of whom had traveled. That’s knocked me out of commission pretty well this week, so much so that it felt like the last three days just kind of fell into a time chasm: one minute I’m perfectly fine and the next minute it’s April, I’ve got forty-nine unread emails, and I’ve done nothing but watch Animal Planet. Thanks, stomach virus. Food and I are only just getting back on speaking terms today, three days later, and even that’s still a rocky relationship.

I’d finally had enough of laying around by last night and tried to at least finish up my Silverton Sage yarn — I almost had to put my spinning away before it was done because I couldn’t even stand looking at the rotation of the wheel in my peripheral vision, but I finished it up and ended up with a wonderful skein of over 200 yards, exactly the color I’d been hoping for. Pictures are from my cellphone because I didn’t have enough energy to set up a nicer shot.

Silverton Sage yarn. 220+ yards, 3-ply Alpaca/Merino/Silk blend.

I’m anxious to start knitting this up into the Duet pattern from Knitty. The color and its texture are just about perfect.

This weekend I also finished knitting my Falkland/Alpaca/Nylon test socks. I wore these to work this week and they’re unbelievably warm.

Falkland/Alpaca/Nylon test socks.

And that’s it for this week. See you next week when I hope to be healthier. Check out other great Fiber Arts Friday posts over at WonderWhyGal’s great blog!

This week was mostly about blending. A few weeks ago you’ll recall that I blended up and dyed a roughly 60/20/20 blend of Falkland wool, alpaca from Benz, and nylon for socks. (You know, I actually suspect it’s closer to a 50/25/25 blend…I lost a lot of shorter Falkland fibers on the first pass and that probably changed the ratio.) As a refresher, here are those socks in progress — I’ve only got the rest of the leg to knit on the second sock and then they’re done.

The Falkland/alpaca socks, mostly finished.

I absolutely love how these socks feel and knit so far. The gauge is a little big but it’s live-with-able, and they’ll make perfectly fine socks regardless. But I wanted to make a similar blend for socks and spin and knit a pair for comparison, one made with Blue-Faced Leicester instead of Falkland since BFL is so popular for socks. So that’s what I did this past weekend.

BFL, alpaca, and nylon ready for the dye pot.

Like the other blend I’m pretty sure this is actually closer to a 50/25/25 blend — the first pass on the hackle really weeded out a ton of shorter BFL fibers. I saved that stuff as it will be perfectly fine for carding, but I think it did probably change my final ratio. Like the last sock fiber batch I’m planning on dyeing this as well. I posted a call for color suggestions to the Glorious Grazers fans on Facebook and so far I’m liking the very first suggestion from one Erica Palmer to dye it a royal purple and red combo.

Although I’ve been using Benz’s fleece for a lot of sock fiber lately I’d hate for you to think that his fleece is only good for socks. It’s definitely a higher quality than that. All three of my boys have really great, soft fleece, but I’ve been using Benz’s for socks lately because (a) I’m on a sock yarn kick; (b) I’ve used all of Cinnamon’s from his 2009 shearing; and (c) I tend to save Silverton’s — he has the best quality fleece of the three, in my opinion, and the most beautiful natural color — for finer products.

Moving on to the next blend…remember the dye experiments from last week? I thought those might look good carded up, and I wanted to blend in some fleece from one of my boys for added softness. On hindsight I should have used Benz’s since black would have been the perfect color addition here, but oddly I chose Silverton’s. I think because I wanted the gray to desaturate the green in the batts somewhat. What I got was a really interesting woodland, forest-like batt.

A Merino/alpaca batt. I'm calling it 'Alpacas in the Mist.'

My first reaction when I took them off the carder was, “well, that’s…uh, interesting.” It didn’t immediately fill me with joy like the Blood Orange batts did. But then I started spinning them and my outlook has changed completely — I haven’t taken a picture of the yarn on the bobbin yet but I really love how the orange and tan blends and mixes randomly with the greens. And yes, Silverton’s gray did neutralize the greens somewhat. I’m spinning it to be a 2-ply worsted weight yarn and I should end up with a reasonable yardage. It’ll probably go in the Etsy shop as I’ve been wanting to add more yarns that actually have some of my boys’ fleece in them and only a couple of those are in the shop currently (I’ve sold quite a few to coworkers, of all people).

In the dyeing segment of this week’s work we have a small amount of Merino that I dyed a simple blue. My plan is to blend this in a 50/50 blend with Silverton’s fleece, card it, spin it, and then ply it with a silver thread. I really think that’ll look stunning. I saw some traces of purple in there; I’m not sure if that’s left over from my last dye batch and I just didn’t clean out the pot well or what, but it should just add nicely to the final color.

A few ounces of Merino, dyed a simple blue with a little purple left over in there.

In the finished yarn category there’s the milk fiber that I finally finished and plied. My thoughts on this were a resounding “meh.” As I said before, it was pleasant enough to spin, at least most of the time — I occasionally found that it drafted a bit like pure soy silk in that you have spots that were super easy to draft and spots where it just didn’t want to slide at all (this is why I always blend soy silk). But it just doesn’t seem to offer anything new to me as a fiber except a lot of baggage since the processing is supposedly pretty chemically intensive. But at least when I look at it now in the spinning supply shops I don’t have to feel it and wonder. Spinning this was like trying on that dress you really love on the rack but are pretty sure you won’t like on you, and then actually being relieved that you were right, it looks terrible on you, and you no longer have to wonder or spend money on something you aren’t going to like. You just know.

Milk fiber yarn, spun fingering weight 2-ply.

The dye job — not mine — was certainly pretty, and if you’re wondering where it came from it’s a sample from the Moonlight & Laughter Etsy shop — she has some really pretty rovings so be sure and check her out.

And finally, in the Featured Yarn category, it’s one of my first attempts at a yarn that is completely out of my comfort zone, an art yarn that really tests my skills, all ten years of them.

Now, don’t laugh.

Okay, you aren’t going to laugh, right? Because you promised.

Green Apple Martini & Keep 'Em Comin'.

It’s called “Green Apple Martini & Keep ‘Em Comin’”, and I haven’t decided what I think about it. On the one hand, it’s definitely quite different from the yarns I usually spin. On the other hand, I’m not sure it’s what I had envisioned when I planned this yarn, and that’s really the ultimate test, isn’t it? The mohair is far chunkier that I thought it would be, and there’s simply too much of it, I think. The BFL green base is fine, but even plied with the thread it’s got too much of a…well, plied look.

I know that sounds silly, but I think ultimately what I really want is a low-twist single, roughly worsted weight, one that is fairly even and consistent in thickness except for occasional gradual and minimal changes in that thickness, and with small mohair cherry locks worked in somehow very sparingly. But how to work in those mohair locks without plying the yarn in order to hold them? Maybe what I really need to do is card some mohair and marl it into the yarn in spots. I’m not sure. So I’m considering this a test version of my idea, and so in some respects even if I’m not wild about it it was a success: I learned something about what I really wanted and how to execute on the yarn I’m seeing in my head, and I have some better ideas on how to do that for a 2.0 version. This version is currently hanging on my fiber rack on the wall so I can see it and mull it over visually for a while. Maybe I’ll come to a different opinion about it the more I look at it.

I’m putting in a lot of hours right now at work so my spinning time is reduced for at least a few weeks, but I should still have something to show for next week. And of course, between now and then you should check out all the other fiber arts posts at Fiber Arts Friday on WonderWhyGal’s awesome blog!

One of my Christmas gifts this year was a beautiful Golding drop spindle, given to me by Matt’s mom. I always like to have a spindle project going even though I do the bulk of my spinning at the wheel because spindle projects are so portable. I still had some of Cinnamon’s undyed combed top that I’d carded with soy silk in a roughly 50/50 blend; I figured this was the perfect spindle project. I didn’t have a ton of it and figured if I could spin it laceweight then maybe I could make a small project with it.

The finished alpaca/soy silk blend, with the Golding spindle used to spin it.

I’ve got quite a few spindles and I won’t hesitate to say that this is by far the best one I have and have used so far. It spins for what seems like forever and it’s incredibly light. It doesn’t store much because it’s so small, but on a spindle this light I’d primarily be doing laceweight projects anyway.

Now, one misconception that a lot of beginner spinners have is that the measure of a spinner’s talents lies in how fine he or she can spin yarn. That’s certainly one type of measure but it’s not the sum total — the real measure is in whether or not the spinner can produce a usable yarn that’s designed well for the project it intends to become. I could spin a fine 2-ply alpaca yarn in laceweight, but if that yarn was supposed to be for socks that my yarn is going to work pretty poorly for the project.

That said, I’m a little too proud of just how fine I was able to spin this yarn. It’s probably the smallest gauge yarn I’ve spun to date, and I’m going to take a little undeserved pride in that.

Possibly the finest yarn I've ever spun.

Another project I worked on over the last couple of months was some commissioned yarn from Jody at Jo’s Fleece Fields. Jody had asked me to spin some fiber from her pygora goats — it was the first time in six years she’d been able to get fiber from them and she was anxious to see what kind of yarn it made. I was curious myself so I said sure. The pygora top arrived in two small and extremely soft rovings, one white and one gray, both about one ounce. Per Jody’s request I spun it into a 2-ply sportweight yarn, and the result was unbelievably soft, and the denim look is great in this yarn.

Pygora yarn, spun into a 2-ply denim.

There was one problem with this fleece: guard hairs. Goat fiber typically has guard hairs in it that, if not picked out before spinning, can make a yarn go from cashmere-soft to feeling like steel wool. Most processors experienced with goat fiber can de-hair fleece, and this fleece had in fact been de-haired but it still had a significant amount of guard hair in it, so much so that I didn’t feel right spinning it until I did a pass on it myself. So I got out a towel, sat down in front of the TV, and picked.

That took for. ev. ER. Have you ever wondered why cashmere — the same family of fiber that top-quality pygora falls into — has been the fabric of kings and queens and why it’s so expensive, at least in the pre-Chinese-cashmere-market days? It’s because someone had to sit down and pick each of those guard hairs out, one by one, until the fiber was fit enough to spin into the softest of soft yarn. I now have great respect for that person. The resulting yarn in this case was well worth the effort — it’s softer than you can imagine and the gray has a lovely, silky, silvery shimmer to it. While I didn’t enjoy the de-hairing, I did fully enjoy the hand of the fiber, and I can just imagine blending some of this with alpaca.

Another avenue of spinning I’ve moved into is dyeing my own fiber. This was something I was always afraid of since I assumed this would result in me turning our kitchen into an accidental mess of unintentionally-splashed color. But it’s actually been really easy and not as messy as I thought. I used a lot of Cinnamon’s white fleece from this year’s shearing as a base with which to experiment, and one of the results of those experiments was an interesting skein of autumn-like colors.

A dyeing experiment that didn't turn out like I'd planned, yet still is kind of neat.

I combined a few dyes in a pot that I thought would actually blend a lot differently — I used salmon, burgundy, and yellow, and I expected far more reds and pinks. What I failed to take into account was something that Matt reminded me of, and given our lines of work it’s pretty funny that I didn’t think of it (I’m a UI designer, and he’s an FX artist and previously a graphic designer): colors add to black. I’m so used to working in a Photoshop/web environment in which colors add up to white that I forgot that this doesn’t happen in the real world. Duh. Regardless, the color variation turned out to look vaguely like leaves in autumn in New England, where I’m originally from, and I like it. The yarn is 100% alpaca from Cinnamon, spun into a 3-ply yarn using the Navajo (or chain ply) method.

Another dyeing experiment that came out more like I envisioned it has been my “Red Berries” project. I loved the results of this one so much that I took copious notes so that I could reproduce it later. I started with something a little easier: commercially-prepared 50/50 Merino/Tencel top. Since this was in roving form I coiled it loosely into my disposable foil turkey roasting pan, soaked it in water and vinegar and, using the Jacquard Acid Dye colors of Burgundy, Salmon, Fire Red, and Scarlet Red, randomly splotched dye in roughly equal amounts over the whole roving. The result was the roving you see below.

A 50/50 Merino/Tencel blend, hand-dyed. I'm calling it Red Berries.

It already looked pretty tasty just sitting there, but once I began spinning it the results were even more fantastic. Just take a look at those rich purples and striking reds! And what you don’t see are the occasional long shots of really bright, awesome, hot salmon color that just goes perfectly with it.

Red Berries on the bobbin.

I chose to spin this into a 3-ply sock yarn. I didn’t get the gauge of the singles quite as thin as I’d like so the resulting yarn is a bit thicker than your usual sock yarn gauge — it’s more like sportweight. But the socks I’m knitting from it are beautiful and I love them, and they’ll likely be my kick-around-the-house socks rather than in-shoe socks.

The final yarn. Love it!

And finally, the last of the Show and Tell projects: the Silverton Sweater. I’m in the batt-making stage, carding Silverton’s locks on the drumcarder and adding in a little bit of Merino that I’ve dyed in various shades of blue and a little bit of silky white Tencel. The result is very pretty and I can’t wait to do some test spinning.

Silverton Sweater batt, one of many. About 60% alpaca, 20% Merino, and 20% Tencel.

I’m planning to spin this one long draw so that I can get a purely woolen yarn out of it — I’d like it to be lofty and airy. Then I plan to ply it 3-ply and am going to try for a sportweight gauge. My planned pattern is a top-down raglan style with some kind of subtle cabling in it. I’ve never made a full sweater from my own handspun and I’m really anxious to have one from the fiber of my own alpacas. Really looking forward to this project.

There are three of them — Cinnamon, Benz, and Silverton — and they are completely adorable as alpacas are wont to be. Those of you who’ve been following our progress on Facebook already know their origin story, so you can feel free to skip a bit. But for those that don’t, we got them from Don and Jody Stanwyck of Jo’s Fleece Fields, who’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty in helping us prepare to be first-time alpaca owners. I’d read and researched for years but the time had finally come to actually get alpacas, because the only way I was going to learn any more was by actually owning them.

The first question I usually get is, “why would you own alpacas?” I own them because I’ve been a handspinner for a few years now, making my own yarn out of what used to be fiber that was bought and prepared by someone else. Occasionally I’d bought a fleece from someone that needed washing and preparing, but that had been the closest to the beginning of the chain that I’d ever come.

With my own alpacas I’ll have a constant source of fiber to spin. Sure, there’s effort and cost in raising them, but they’re surprisingly easy to take care of and there are lots of other benefits, such as the fact that they’re exceptionally goofy looking and adorable and we have a good laugh every time we see them. The amount of money I’d spend in yarn would probably equal their cost of care anyway. And my plan is to eventually sell the yarn I make from them that I don’t use — there will come a day far in the future when I no longer want to work in the games industry and would rather do something like a cottage industry where I make and sell my own handspun yarn.

We started with three knowing that our pasture (which totals about three quarters of an acre) could easily support that without hay supplement (except in the non-growing season), and expect to be able to comfortably expand up to five, but we’re taking this year to see how fast three alpacas can munch down the existing grass before we do that. We looked at various farms before buying and bought these three boys because they seemed like the perfect fit for my criteria: they’re highly socialized and easy to handle (two of them are 4-H animals and have had myriad kids handling them over time), have lived together on the same farm for a while so they’re already companions, and their fleeces have great handspinning qualities. It was a great bonus that one of them, Cinnamon, has mostly white fleece, making it perfect for dying.

Once the boys were settled in I decided that with the time off I currently have I’d start a project that I’d document with photos in which I take one of the boys’ fleeces and show everything about taking it from raw fleece to a knitted item from start to finish. I decided to go with Silverton’s first — his beautiful gray and silver fleece was begging to be spun up.

The fleece seemed surprisingly clean. While there’s definitely some dirt that comes out during preparation it’s nothing like some of the fleeces I’ve worked with before that were so matted with dirt and VM (vegetative matter) in parts that it was hard work to deal with.

I decided at the start that the knitted item I’d make with it would be some kind of shawl. I wanted to make this 100% alpaca so that it would be an all-Silverton preparation in the end, and 100% alpaca doesn’t have the memory that a wool or wool blend would have. This means I need to knit something that can have a little stretch in it and not stretch out of shape, so a sweater wasn’t the best idea. A folk-style shawl knitted in roughly a sport or fingering weight yarn seems like the perfect idea.

Looking at the fleece made me initially decide to try flick-carding it. Flick-carding is a preparation technique in which you simply take the locks out and, holding them by their butt ends (the end cut by the shearer), you flick the lock ends with either a special comb or a dog brush (a dog brush is essentially the same thing) to open them up. You then flip the locks around and do the same with the butt ends. From here you can either spin them like that or pull it into a roving. I didn’t actually think to do this last part, so I flick-carded a bunch of locks and set them aside for spinning.

The next step was deciding if I wanted to spin on a drop spindle or my wheel. I have a Louet S10 spinning wheel, and it’s been a great wheel over the years. But as I’ve been able to refine my technique I’ve found that it’s less suitable for finer yarns, which are the yarns I’ve been spinning more of. It’s single treadle, Irish tension, and has few ratios, which means the take-up is very strong and you have to treadle like mad to get any reasonable speed. Any spinning I’ve done in the last year has mainly been on a drop spindle and I tend to reserve the Louet for plying, which it’s really perfect for. I do plan to upgrade to another wheel (keeping the Louet for plying) but until then, it’s a drop spindle mostly for me.

So I picked up my favorite spindle and spun up a test skein from the flick-carded locks. The resulting skein was very cloudy and fluffy, far cloudier than I thought it would be. I’m pretty sure that flick-carding locks should result in a semi-worsted preparation because the fibers are all aligned, but this skein was far more like a woolen preparation. Which wasn’t bad, mind you, just not quite what I expected.

So I decided that since I’d recently sprung for a swanky new set of St. Blaise wool combs that I would try making some combed top from the fleece and spin a worsted skein to test against the flick-carded skein and see which I liked better. I’m really loving the preparation I’m getting from my combs — I’ll be hard-pressed to want to hand-card anything again unless I specifically want a woolen yarn — but I also know that there’s more waste when you make combed top. But given the size of the bag of fleece — and the fact that the fleece producer is out in my pasture eating grass to make more fleece for next year — I’m less worried about waste than if I’d just bought a small amount of rare fiber. So, combs away!

Again, I spun up a test single, used an Andean bracelet to ply it back on itself since it was a small amount, and washed the skein. When I compared it to the skein from the flick-carded locks I was pleasantly surprised to actually notice a difference: the combed top produced a nice, smooth, more lustrous worsted yarn that still had some cloud to it but was less cloudy than the other skein.

Now, any experienced spinners reading this are probably laughing. “Well, of course that’s what you’re going to get with it, silly.” This is Spinning 101 stuff for those that don’t know; woolen yarns are fluffier, have more air pockets between the fibers, and are generally cloudier. This is because the fibers aren’t spun parallel to each other — they’re in a more random arrangement, producing a yarn that will be warmer and fluffier, suitable for garments that you want to be warm and fluffy. Woolen yarns are usually produced by carding fibers, which arranges the fibers a bit more randomly and usually perpendicular to the direction in which you’re going to spin them. Worsted yarns, on the other hand, are produced by combing the fibers so that they lie parallel to one another. Spinning them produces a more compact and lustrous yarn that has a stronger tensile strength and will pill less. The yarn would be less suitable for a garment you want to be warm and fluffy — or a garment that you’d want to retain its warmth when wet, like a fisherman’s sweater — but would be perfect for something that’s going to get a lot of wear, such as a pair of socks. It’s possible to spin a semi-worsted or semi-woolen yarn that has a little of both properties to it by varying your spinning technique on combed top.
So getting an actual worsted yarn from fleece that I turned into combed top isn’t exactly a revelation. But this is the first time I’ve ever actually approached my spinning in any kind of scientific way, producing different preparations and analyzing what my own hands actually produce from start to finish. Being able to see that yes, I actually do produce two different types of yarn when I do two different types of fiber preparation, and that those preparations turn out as the books tell me they should, is very gratifying.

Now I had to decide which preparation I wanted to use for my finished item. I knit test swatches with both skeins and was surprised to find that visually there was almost no distinction between the two. The worsted skein produced maybe a slightly less cloudy and more even swatch, but you had to really look closely to see that. How they felt, however, was completely different. The flick-carded yarn produced a much loftier swatch; it felt thicker and squishier. The worsted skein produced a thinner swatch that felt like it had better drape.

Shawls typically are soft, cloudy, and don’t need to be made from worsted yarns as they’re unlikely to be worn to the same degree as, say, a pair of socks. The logical conclusion, then, is that I should go with the flick-carded locks and produce a semi-woolen yarn. But when I looked at both swatches I had to admit that I simply liked the feel of the worsted yarn and its resulting fabric better. It still had a lot of cloudiness to it but had a drape that would fit a shawl nicely and had a much more even look to it. It also helped that spinning the resulting combed top was exceptionally easy — it just spun like a dream. Spinning the flick-carded locks, on the other hand, resulted in a slightly less even yarn. The combed top produced a more consistent yarn that was easier to get close to low sport weight or fingering weight than the flick-carded locks.

So at this point I’m combing the fleece into combed top birds’ nests, and those will be spun on my drop spindle into a 2-ply yarn that will be plied on my Louet wheel. More pictures to come as Project Silverton continues.

Enjoy more Fiber Arts Friday posts!

That’s a good question, and the answer to it is quality. No, seriously. Handspun yarn is always a better quality yarn, not only because the materials are of higher quality but because the handspinning process simply produces a stronger, more durable yarn. And if you’re a spinner who knows what kind of yarn you want for a project, you can create the perfect yarn rather than spending your time hunting in the yarn store for something that won’t be as high quality.
The first yarn I’m offering for sale is a pretty purple superwash wool, two skeins that are around 350 yards each. Superwash wool is wool that doesn’t shrink or felt significantly, meaning that you can throw it in the washer and dryer and don’t have to hand wash it. I spun this as a two-ply yarn with a roughly worsted weight.
I’m also offering a couple of highly intricate scarves for sale — The Peacock and The Seafoam. The Peacock is possibly the single-most intricate and delicate item I’ve ever knit in the fifteen years that I’ve been knitting.
One thing I’m hoping to see Etsy implement is the eBay charity integration. I’d like to be able to automatically donate a portion of the proceeds to a charity, just like MissionFish, but that has yet to be seen on Etsy. When they do I’ll definitely be adding that option to my sales.
I’ll be adding more handspun yarn soon and hopefully some other handknit goodies. Come on, you know you want to buy it!