Batts in the Belfry

Hello again,

I know it’s been a long time. I was wondering if my blog had slowly wound to an end, but then I decided to reallocate some time and recommit. Specifically, I unsubscribed to some email lists and unfollowed a bunch of instagram folks. I am reclaiming the time I spent looking at what other people make and redirecting that time to making my own stuff. And that stuff includes this blog. I enjoy documenting my making process, and I reference my posts more often than I expected to. So here we go again!

My latest spinning project took about 6 weeks from start to finish. The riotous pile of color above is six skeins of yarn made from the six batts I received in Jillian Moreno’s Batts in the Belfry class last fall. I wasn’t at all sure how to spin them but I knew I had been encouraged to play, so I just looked at them for a long time (thank goodness I have a baby grand piano that doubles as a fiber table). Ultimately, I decided to separate the colors (some batts were layered or striped) and card analogous colors together into rolags. I spun those into singles, and then plied the singles together in different combinations.

Here are some of the rolags I made. This was great practice for me to use my hand cards. You can see that some of them have a more homogenous color, while others are more lively:

The content of the batts was not consistent. the labels said “Batts definitely contain mostly wool. They may also contain Alpaca, Mohair, Silk, and/or Nylon.” Different colors drafted differently. I spun these with a long draw technique, but my singles weren’t super consistent because different colors drafted differently. Some were stickier than others, and some were more delicate.

I also did not end up with equal amounts of each color. I knew this would happen and I tried not to let it bother me (but of course it did, a little!).

I wound all my singles onto storage bobbins and decided to make two 3-ply yarns, in these combinations. The top one is “hot” and the bottom is “cool”:

Want to see the results?

Here is the “hot” yarn – a total of 288 yards and 106 grams:

Here is the “cool” yarn – a total of 396 yards and 127 grams:

I still had some singles left, so I made a little 2-ply skein of orange and green together (very sherbet-y). This is only 60 yards and 13 grams:

And then I still had more orange left, so I wound it into a center-pull ball and made a 2-ply from it. I got 94 more yards and 20 grams:

I have a tiny bit more singles in a deep blue and a deep purple, but not enough to mess with.

As usual, I don’t know what to use this yarn for. I thought it might be interesting to try some two-color brioche with the hot and cool skeins of 3-ply, so maybe I’ll look at patterns for that.

I have been reflecting on how uncomfortable I felt that I had all these little batts with little control over color choice and no plan for how to use them. I’m generally okay making a yarn for which I don’t have a project plan, but making a yarn out of material that I didn’t intentionally choose was a new level of discomfort. I find I’m relieved to have turned this into yarn, and also a bit chuffed that I solved the puzzle of how to handle them. Stash no more!