Learn to Love the One You’re With

It occurs to me that if I’d written this post two days ago, it would have been a much different post than the one I’m about to write.  I would have told you all about how I learned the hard way that I know absolutely nothing about plying and that, wonder of wonders (even though it should be common sense) plying actually makes a really huge difference as to what sort of finished yarn you get.

Apparently, so do the (relative?) ages of the singles.

I’ve been spinning like crazy lately… my fibre stash appears to be multiplying rather quickly as I get excited about the potential to be had in a whole host of new fibers and fiber combinations and color combinations and am discovering, much to my surprise, that I can actually, with a little thought and planning control things like color shifts and weight and fluffiness and so on.

The yarn I am about to show you does not reflect this, of course.  My most recent creation taught me a lot about plying.  And a little about how to love the yarn that I create.   The yarn off to the right there is a two-ply, more or less fingering-weight yarn made from worsted-spun singles.  The fiber is a lovely hand-dyed preparation of merino/silk combed top from Hedgehog Fibres.  I spun it on the smallest ratio my wheel has (around 14:1) and went to a slightly lower ratio (11:1 or so) for plying.

It came off the wheel looking, erm…  rather lively.  “No problem,” I thought, as I skeined it… “it’ll all settle neatly into place when I wash it.”  Well, it didn’t exactly settle neatly into place.  I wound up with a yarn with lots of little micro twists; one where there isn’t enough structure in the ply to even remotely keep the singles locked in place.  Oops.  And when I pulled it out of its bath and twirled and thwacked it in my bathroom, I hated it.  I really hated it.  I thought it was ugly disaster yarn and that I was a hopeless spinner.

Then my stubborn Norwegian blood took over, and not to be beaten by my spinning wheel, I finished the remaining singles, studied my yarn and pondered what sorts of changes I could make from the first hank to the second hank, in order to get something more like the yarn that I want.

I decided that, among factors I could control, there certainly wasn’t nearly enough twist in my plying.  (I mean.  All those teeny extra loops…  I figured I could at least solve those by going a little slower and making sure the ply structure was holding my very energetic singles firmly in place).  For the second hank, I plied a lot more carefully.  I held the singles under somewhat better tension … my hands are still learning that part and I don’t really have the kind of Lazy Kate to do that little bit for me.  And at least this time, even though I wound up with a very bouncy hank where the yarn seems to want to twist up on itself just about everywhere (really.  If I wanted to, I could wear this hank as some sort of weird, avant-garde ice princess necklace.  I’m sure it’d be very stylish.  Other than that whole not really being water-resistant thing…), the singles aren’t twisting between the plies.

I’m counting that a victory.

I’m also glad I waited a couple of days to write this post.  Two days ago, I hated the yarn that came out of its finishing bath.  Today… I’m pretty happy with it.  It isn’t the yarn that I wanted to spin.  It isn’t what I’d been thinking about or setting out to do.  But it is soft and squishy with a nice bit of sheen… and it’s even held up to a bit of abuse so I can actually sort of see turning it into a funky scarf or a fluffy tam or something similar.

Meanwhile I’m reassuring myself as to my ability to make slightly less crimpy yarns by finishing up my homework from last week’s Spinning Dream Team class.

Spinning: It’s more addictive than broccoli

Something clicked, the other week, after I finished my first yarn off of my wheel and I’ve hardly been able to stop spinning since.  That’s a little bit of a lie — I don’t think I’ve spun anything in the last couple of days because I dug in to a whole new knitting project  (which,  like a lot of my knitting lately and quite sadly for you, dear reader, is yet another stealth project) and haven’t really had the time to do a bit of both in any given day.  Something about planning a wedding… it takes a lot of time and work.  I know the day will be really lovely, but in all honesty, I cannot wait to be married so that I can be a more selfish knitter invest time in my work and my friends and my own projects that I want to do and that don’t have tight, looming deadlines.  (Like, oh, blogging about Cookie A.’s class at Sock Summit and my sock design and the redesign it needs that I’m really actually going to start once I have time to figure out how the legends in Twisted-Stitch Knitting work… and maybe even knitting those socks.  Or a sweater.  Or a shawl.  Or an anything that is  just for me because I want to make it and want to wear it).

I digress.

So, the Damson came off the wheel and is currently sitting in a tidy little skein while I try to come up with a suitable project for it that I don’t have to design myself…  I had almost settled upon my next fibre (which, despite all of the fiber-stash enhancing I did at Sock Summit actually wound up being fibre I purchased recently from Hedgehog Fibres … go figure) when this beautiful, creamy silk/merino combed top, also from Hedgehog Fibres turned up in my mailbox.

The colorway is called “Irish Sky” and it’s beautiful.  Everything I could wish for in a fiber and then some… and wonderful, soft, sweet colors.  It doesn’t surprise me that by the end of the night, I’d spun over an ounce of fibre.  An ounce still seems like a lot to me… it wasn’t that long ago that I was spinning on a drop spindle and one ounce of fiber took me about two weeks worth of spinning working at it for over an hour each day.  The wheel seems to be an order of magnitude faster.

In any case… in seemingly no time flat, I had a beautiful collection of singles (at least, I think they’re beautiful, but I am maybe a little biased) collected on a bobbin and then two ounces had gone by and suddenly it’s time to change bobbins.  I’m sort of amazed at how somewhere, something clicked and spinning doesn’t feel nearly as complicated as it did even a mere month and a half ago when Miss Patience was nothing more than new addition to my collection of craft tools.  6 weeks of steady practice, I guess.

Of course, to humble myself, I started reading The Intentional Spinner and proceeded to realize just how much I still don’t know and delve right back into being highly critical of my singles.  I tend to overtwist… which is sort of okay because I get tight plies out of it… but I would like to learn to be more sensitive to what the twist is doing on my wheel.  I think the most precious nugget of knowledge I gained from the spindling class I took at Sock Summit was that my drop spindle is a twist-o-meter.  If I pay attention to how it is behaving, I can learn a lot about how much twist I have in my yarn, and whether said yarn is capable of taking up any more twist or not.  Wheels are so fast and so strong (especially mine which is rather weighty and massive) that it’s easy to misjudge the balance of things.  In time, I’ll learn, I suppose.  My brain and my hands and feet will all learn to work together as a complementary unit that manages fiber with both attentiveness and dexterity.  (Yes, I’ve become one of those people who discusses the way in which fiber has a mind of its own.  Really.  Much more than yarn, actually, which is probably one of my biggest adjustments in learning to spin after spending most of my time and effort knitting.  But that’s for another post).

I’m enjoying the journey.  And pretty sure that after a few days away (I have some travel in my future, after all), I fully expect to find myself missing my spinning wheel in the same way that I’ve missed my clothes, or my toys or my stuffed animals when I’ve been far from home in the past.