For the Heck of It

One of the podcasts I listen to regularly is the SpinDoctor podcast. Sasha's 'cast is great for new and experienced spinners alike, as it's filled with great reviews as well as discussions of her own spinning. So when she announced that she was hosting a spinalong of art yarns to go along with Jacey Boggs' book Spin Art, I thought I'd spin along for a bit.

Normally, I'm not that into art yarns; I can appreciate how interesting and pretty they can be, but I've never spun any myself because I don't know what I'd knit with such yarns (not that I end up knitting that much of the yarn I spin anyway!). There were a few yarns in the book that I wanted to try however. The first was a cabled yarn, which I did last month with a Crown Mountain Farms club shipment. Another was a corespun yarn, which is the most recent thing off my wheel:

The core was a bit of fiber leftover from last year's sweater project; I spun it, with lots of extra twist, in the direction I normally ply so that I could do the wrapping in the direction I normally spin my singles. For a corespun yarn, you hold the fiber perpendicular to the core so that it can literally wrap around the core. This means that some twist is introduced as the core is wound on, so you need more twist than usual in the core so that the yarn is balanced in the end. For the wrap, I dug deep into my stash and found some colonial wool top from Paradise Fibers that I bought for practice (and evidently never used) when I first got my Lendrum four years ago.

This skein is about 111 yards and pretty wildly inconsistent -- not surprising, given how awkward the process felt the whole time -- but it's pretty well balanced and fairly soft, so I'm pretty happy with it. I still, however, have no idea what to do with this yarn! I didn't love corespinning, but I suspect that's mainly because it felt so awkward; it's hard to love something that's hard. I'd be willing to give it another try -- eventually. For now, I am spinning up the rest of this colonial top into my usual yarn (I started with 8 oz., so this'll make a good dent in my stash).