handspun in purple

So, I had all these big plans to write up a second post about my trip to Vancouver, where I talked about how I went to Baaad Anna’s and bought some yarn and kind of accidentally started a sweater. But that sweater is so close to finished at this point that it kind of doesn’t seem worth it to post progress photos.

Instead, I’m going to talk about handspun. Remember this spinning progress? It’s yarn now.

This is approximately 100m of worsted weight, spun from SweetGeorgia Superwash Merino fiber.

When I first bought this fiber, I had visions of pretty variegated purple-and-yellow yarn. I spun this a bit differently than I have before: I usually spin fiber by breaking off pieces starting from one end, and progressing to the other end. Because of how this fiber was dyed, I realized that if I did that, I was going to end up with yards and yards of purple yarn with a few yards of yellow, rather than frequent, shorter yellow bits. In order to get around this, I split the top lengthwise, into eighths, and then spun each of those from end to end.

To keep the colour runs together and prevent barberpoling, I chain-plied the singles (which I am getting really good at doing on my wheel, now). I am also a big believer in washing, then thwacking, then reskeining, to make sure the twist is set and to get a really good sense of whether my yarn is balanced. I know I say this about all of my handspun, but this is probably the highest-quality yarn I’ve made to date. It’s so gratifying to see myself improving when I compare my earlier handspun to my more recent work.

Unfortunately, I only have 100m of this yarn, which really isn’t a lot! I made the mistake of trying to fiddle with my tension without really knowing what I was doing, and the first 25g of singles I spun were completely unusable. It, uh, definitely taught me a lot about how to work with my wheel, instead of against it.

And I think I have enough of this that I could still make something fun – I’m picturing a pair of little fingerless mittens, or a slouchy beret.