It’s been a while since I last made a blog post. Various reasons, including the continued poor weather. Even though it’s now March and the crocuses and the early daffodils are up, we are still having cold, snowy, frosty and grey days. Sadly this makes taking pictures tricky. However, the sun finally came out briefly yesterday afternoon, so I’ve been able to take pictures of work in progress.
A few weeks ago I received a lovely spinning book for my birthday. It’s The Spinner’s Book of Yarn Designs by Sarah Anderson:
Yes, I did just grab that image from the preview on Amazon’s site.
The book’s absolutely brilliant. Full of inspiring techniques and ideas for yarn constructions I’ve not come across before. I love the clear diagrams that show the construction of a yarn at a glance. My first project inspired by this is a 3 ply yarn, with a construction similar to a cabled yarn. It’s called a Crepe yarn. 2 singles are spun in one direction, then plied. Then a second single is spun in the plied direction and plied with the original 2 ply. Are you still following? No? The “at a glance” diagram would really help here – which is one reason the book is so brilliant.
I’m spinning this with a thick single from my dyed BFL (the pinky/orange one), here it is a few weeks ago:
and two thin singles of natural white Shetland. I was aiming at a Bubble or Rickrack Crepe yarn, but I don’t think there’s enough difference in the thickness of the singles. At the two ply stage I have two almost full bobbins of yarn. However, I don’t have enough bobbins for the wheel I’m using for this spinning, so have wound the 2-ply off into skeins:
As there’s a lot of unbalanced twist in this 2-ply, the skeins are a little like super-scrunchies. I’m sure there are good reasons not to handle the yarn-in-progress in this way, but I’m afraid I don’t know them (a little knowledge at this stage may be a dangerous thing). At the moment I’m working on the second white single. When I ply I’ll put each skein onto my swift and ply from the swift and a bobbin. I’ve not done this before! It could all turn into a huge tangle of wild yarn!