handspun funtimes: an open letter

Dear everyone,

I made some yarn. It’s a very dignified sort of deep magenta, which less discriminating types might call pink. I like it an awful lot.

I’m not tremendously sophisticated when it comes to my spinning, so I spun this pretty much the way I’ve been spinning all of my yarn lately: short draw for singles, chain plied, washed & thwacked. Someday I will branch out and learn an exciting new spinning skill, but not today.

The fiber is from v i o l a, it’s her BFL top in raspberry. I absolutely adore the way she dyed this, with just enough variegation to be interesting. It’s fingering weight, and I am tremendously proud of myself for that, because, a) I was patient enough to spin a whole four ounces of fiber into teeny tiny singles without getting frustrated, and b) now I have 291m of fingering weight yarn.

c) I’m 99% sure that’s enough for a pair of socks, if you are me and have small feet!

d) Handspun socks! That’s not quite something to cross off my to-do list, but it’s awfully close.

In conclusion, I am very, very excited to finish my big blue blanket so that I have an excuse to get this yarn onto my needles.

Love,
Me

this is another spinning post

I had the chance to go to the DKC Knitter’s Frolic this weekend. (For the not-from-Ontario: the Frolic is a weekend-long fiber festival, with workshops and a marketplace full of lots of awesome people.) I went last year, not really knowing what to expect, but this year I had plans. I had a Market Agenda, which is important if you’re a person like me who is easily dazzled by soft, fluffy wool and pretty colours.

I mentioned to Steph that I wanted to spin more this year, and that one of my goals was to stock up on some spinning fiber. I feel pretty comfortable spinning small, 4-oz batches of yarn, but I’d really like to start trying to spin with greater quantities, so that I can make larger projects. And she wandered around the market with me and pointed out all of the good places to get fiber, while I thought about all of the awesome things I could spin.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up wandering home with a little over a pound of BFL/Shetland lamb roving. Let me tell you, that is one way to get some funny looks on the subway.

(Cat for scale)

I got it from Hopeful Shetlands, and it is gorgeous. It’s got this really nice soft, sproingy texture, and it’s undyed, but the colour is beautiful. I absolutely love the look of naturally black/brown wool.

My goal is to sit down with this on a regular basis over the summer, and turn it into yarn. I tend to go on spinning jags, where I’ll use my wheel a lot for a couple of weeks and then let it languish, but this is some pretty solid motivation for me to use the wheel more regularly. (Also, uh, the Big Bag of Fiber doesn’t really fit into my stash boxes so well. A Much Smaller Bag Of Yarn will.)

It’s also a pretty great incentive to finish up the project I’ve got on my wheel right now.

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.