More Blue Yarn, Woolen This Time

Last week I had the fun opportunity to do a spinning demo for a class of first-year students at my college.  Their course is called A Matter of Substance, and it’s about the raw materials that make up our world.  The faculty member is a physical chemist by training.  The students are writing papers about things like wood, glass, steel, plastic, etc., and one of them chose to write about textiles.  (She might have had a nudge from me, her friendly reference librarian.)  So the professor asked me to do a short spinning demo for the class.

I decided to take both spindle and wheel, and to have the wheel set up with finished singles ready to ply.  That meant I needed to spin some singles, since I had recently finished the Mohair-Finn yarn.  I grabbed the remaining Heidi’s Blues roving I purchased at the 2008 Knitters’ Day Out market.  This was one of the first things I spun, and some of it became 40th Birthday Yarn for Kristina. 

Here was the original 1/2 lb of roving (called Heidi’s Blues – I think one of the sheep was named Heidi):

Here was Kristina’s birthday yarn (248 yards, 114 g, 2-ply):

And here is the remaining yarn from the Heidi’s Blues roving (209 yards, 91 grams, 2-ply). There was way more yellow in this half of the roving!I tried to spin this in more of a woolen style and I do think it looks fuzzier than the first skein.  Usually I spin worsted, but I wanted to try something different and see if I could change my drafting style (which is very inchworm-y). I think I felt more free to experiment with this roving because some of it had already been finished successfully.  It’s a weird mind game, but I felt like I could afford to mess this up, you know?  My singles were definitely less consistent and more fuzzy (less smooth) than they usually are. 

I had a little bit left on one bobbin, so I fired up YouTube and taught myself how to Navajo ply (I found this video to be the most helpful).  For my readers who don’t yet spin, Navajo ply is a 3-ply technique that actually creates a chained yarn rather than a plied yarn.  You make it from one single (not singles from 3 different bobbins), which makes it great for using up every last bit of single on the bobbin.  It is also used when spinners want to preserve the color changes in a painted roving so that the resulting yarn moves from one color to another (rather than showing a barber pole type stripe).  I WAY overplied my Navajo ply bit – it relaxed a little in a hot bath but is still twisting like crazy.  Clearly I need to work on this technique some more.  Let’s end with another good photo, shall we?