Too Much of a Good Thing?

If you've followed my spinning at all, then you know I like a lot of twist in my yarns. In most cases, that can be a good thing, because I spin a lot of sock yarn and extra twist can mean added durability. However, putting in a lot of twist can be a hard habit to break, and there are times when it's not as desirable. That might be the case for the yarn that came off my wheel this past Monday.

This was 4 oz. of Bee Mice Elf mixed BFL/silk, the last shipment I got when I was still in the fiber club, a colorway called Well Preserved. I split it in half (by folding the length of top in two and ripping at the fold line) so that any colors that lined up would be purely accidental. It took me a really long time to spin up all the singles and a good day and a half to ply, but I ended up with roughly 663 yards of two-ply lace weight. Sounds good so far, right? Here's the rub: As much as I snapped the skein after washing to distribute the twist, there's still a good about of plying twist left in it.

If you look closely just below the penny in this shot, you can see a little pigtail where the yarn has twisted back on itself. There are a quite a few spots like that in the skein. Now, if I knit this into a lace item and block the heck out of it (as I normally do), it likely won't be an issue, but sometimes I want my lace yarn to have a little more softness to it, so I'm considering running this back through the wheel very quickly to take out just a little of the excess twist.

The twist issue aside, I'm very pleased with this yarn. The colors are beautiful, and the skein has a really attractive luster to it. It was also a very pleasant spin. I left the BME club because I was a little unhappy with part of the experience, but the fiber quality didn't have anything to do with it. This braid was prepped well and drafted beautifully. Other than an occasional small slub of silk (which seems to be pretty common in a silk blend), there were no issues.

Meanwhile, I'm continuing to make slow but steady progress on my Fat Cat Knits Polwarth/silk. Here it was earlier this afternoon:

This was near the end of the second strip of fiber, and shortly after I took this photo, I joined in the third strip, so I'm now back into purple. This means that I'm just slightly more than halfway done. It's going to take some serious time to get it all done (and I don't even want to think about how long it will take to chain ply), but I know I'm going to love this yarn when it's done. I can see that I'm making a dent when I sit down for any length of time, so I'm going to make an effort to fit in some more spinning during the week.

I Put It Off Long Enough

Spinning laceweight yarn is truly an exercise in endurance. First, you have to spin the singles, which of course have to be very fine if the finished yarn is going to be thin. That, for me at least, can take quite a while. When you finished that, you then have to get yourself mentally and physically ready to deal with all you've spun again as you ply. In my case, I started spinning some Bee Mice Elf mixed BFL/silk on one of the last days of the Tour de Fleece. Here's what it looked like to refresh your memory:

Normally I'd use my miniSpinner to ply, but I had the itch to start spinning up some other pretty fiber on it, so the two bobbins sat. Today, I decided it was finally time to start plying. A couple of girlfriends were coming over for the afternoon to knit and spin while the Mister took Rainbow to a birthday party, so it was the perfect excuse to sit at the wheel for several hours. Here's how the bobbin looked about halfway through:

I'm not finished yet, but I can see the end in sight, so I'm hoping to finish, skein, and wash tomorrow while we're off for the holiday. It will feel great to start a new month with a new skein of handspun!

The Proverbial Carrot

Usually I like to spend my Friday evenings at my wheel. By the time the end of the week comes, my brain is usually so fried that following any kind of knitting pattern is a lost cause. On top of that, the Mister ofter falls asleep very early, so it works out well for me to be sitting at my wheel and watching or listening to something on my laptop. For the past couple of weeks, though, circumstances got in the way, so it was extra relaxing to sit down at my Lendrum this past Friday with some nice fiber.

I managed to finish up the first bobbin of singles of the Bee Mice Elf mixed BFL/silk (which drafts pretty much effortlessly, let me tell you).

I immediately started in on the second bobbin and got a layer done before I got up for the night.

Now, as nice as this fiber is to spin and as much as I like the colors, it does get a bit tedious after a while to spin such fine singles, and I find myself thinking of what I should spin next. It helps that I have some really yummy stuff that is next in the queue, and it's what's keeping my nose to the grindstone to get this yarn done.

This is my most recent Fat Cat Knits Mixed Blessings Club shipment, five delicious ounces of Polwarth/silk, which might just be my most favorite blend ever. This duo came with the names Betty Boop and Olive Oyl.

These club shipments always force me to think a bit more before I start spinning, because I have to think about how I want the colors to mix, if at all. I could always go the easy way out and spin each braid up separately and ply them together, but I wanted to do something more interesting with this pair. Then I saw someone post a combination yarn in the FCK group on Ravelry and knew I had to copy it. If you look at each end of the two braids, you can see that they'd transition nicely from one to the other. So I split each braid in half lengthwise and matched up the ends, like so:

I'll start spinning at one end, overlapping when I get to the breaks, and spin all the fiber onto one bobbin. Then I'll chain ply to keep the colors distinct. When I'm done, I'll have a bright, self-striping, pseudo-rainbow yarn.

Spin Me a Rainbow

After being away from my spinning wheels for a couple of weeks, I was eager to get back to them this week, so on Monday, I started a new project. At the Indie Knit and Spin last November, I picked up 6 oz. of Polwarth in Rainbow shades -- 1 oz. each of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple -- from Fibernymph Dye Works. I decided to do a traditional three ply, so I split each color into three (roughly) equal parts and started spinning. I've only spent a little time spinning this week, but I'm more than halfway done with the first bobbin.

I'm overlapping the colors a bit when I join in a new one, but mostly it goes from one color to the next. The fiber was a bit compacted when I pulled it out of the bag, which made splitting it a bit tricky, so I'm sure the changes won't be at the same spot in all three plies.

Meanwhile, I had a bit of a surprise midweek when my last shipment from the Bee Mice Elf fiber club showed up.

This one is called Well Preserved, and it's on a delicious blend of 85% mixed BFL and 15% silk -- it should be a dream to spin. Now, I just have to decide how I want to spin it!

A Last Skein, a Day Late

This post should have gotten up yesterday, but I didn't get around to washing this skein until last night after Rainbow was in bed, so I had to wait until today for it to be dry and photographed. This will be my last handspun skein for the year, as I'm not planning on taking any spinning with me to Florida at this point.

I started with the most recent Bee Mice Elf fiber club shipment, 4 oz. of superwash merino in a very vibrant colorway called Scenic Drive.

I split the top for fractal spinning -- I split it in half lengthwise and then one of the halves in half lengthwise -- and spun two bobbins of singles on my miniSpinner (I thought a faster option was better considering I wanted to get everything done before we went away). I plied over the course of a couple evenings and finished up yesterday morning. It fluffed up ever so slightly in the finishing and the colors stayed just as vibrant.

The finished yarn looks to be about sport weight (which seems to be my new default weight for two ply) and roughly 345 yards.

I really love this skein -- and so does Rainbow. She's already asked me several times if it's for her, so I suppose I need to find something to do with it that will be appropriate for her.

We are leaving tomorrow for a quick trip to visit some friends for Christmas and then head to Florida for about a week and a half on Friday. I'm still trying to figure out what knitting to pack -- that's always the hardest part of packing for me!

Color Craving Satisfied

I've been doing some deadline knitting that's kept me busy for much of the past week, so it was such a treat to sit down at my wheel the last two evenings to keep spinning my latest Bee Mice Elf club shipment.

These colors are pretty accurate, and I'm just loving how they've been transitioning from one to another. I finished spinning up the last of the fiber you see here this morning, so I will be able to ply soon and see how the colors blend. I'm wishing that I had gotten more than one braid of this fiber!

A Future in Plying

Even though I've spent much more time knitting this week, I managed to finish up a whole bunch of singles in the past two days, which means I'll be doing a lot of plying in the week ahead.

First, I finally finished the sixth and final sock batt on my spindle. I had just a bit of fiber left to spin after lunch on Friday, so I finished it up in the car on the way to dinner on Friday night. Spinning in the backseat of a moving vehicle is an interesting experience, to say the least. I ended up resorting to park and draft for the last bit.

Isn't this a beautiful sight? This is the largest project I've ever spun on a spindle; overall, I averaged about a week per ounce. I'm planning to ply these up on a wheel, and I don't anticipate that plying will take me more than three or four spinning sessions. I'm going to mix up the "bobbins" for plying to even out my consistency, as I would for a sweater, so I should end up with two pretty similar skeins of sock yarn.

Meanwhile, I've spent a little bit of time here and there on the Lendrum. Last night, Rainbow fell asleep pretty early, leaving me with a solid two hours to watch Orange Is the New Black on my computer and spin. I finished the third bobbin of my latest Bee Mice Elf club fiber, so now I'm ready to ply that as well.

Judging just from how the bobbins look, I'd say my spinning was pretty consistent, because they're more or less even. This should ply up to be a fingering weight, but I doubt I'll use the resulting yarn for socks -- the bamboo content will make the knit fabric too drapey, I think. However, I think it will be fabulous for a shawl or scarf or cowl. I know from using some handspun with a similar blend in the past that bamboo feels cool and silky, and it feels wonderful around the neck.

With any luck, by this time next week, I'll have three finished skeins to show you!

Hazy Days

As promised, I have finished yarn. This is the most recent shipment from the Bee Mice Elf fiber club, a colorway called Hazy Days on superwash BFL. As a reminder, here's what the fiber looked like when it arrived:

I didn't do anything special to the fiber beforehand; I just undid the braid, folded the length of top in half, and tore it apart at the fold point. I happened to make the split in the middle of a stretch of one color, so I spun one half starting at the split and the other half ending with it to try to avoid having that color plied with itself. Frankly, I was a little surprised at how often this color matching I was trying to avoid happened serendipitously, as I was expecting much more barberpoling.

The skein looks to be about sportweight and is 196 yards. I think I might have gotten better yardage had I not put quite so much plying twist in. I generally like a lot of twist in my yarns and regularly have a twisty skein when I pull it off the niddy noddy, but most of the time the twist evens out in the wash. Not so this time. In fact, if you look closely, you can see a little corkscrew coming off the back of the right side of the skein in the photo above. I could run it back through the wheel to take out some twist, but realistically I'm unlikely to do that (I'm too lazy to ball it up, run it through the wheel, reskein, and rewash when I could just move on to the next thing).

Speaking of the next thing, it's already on the wheel. This is the rest of the Crown Mountain Farms corriedale pencil roving I used for my experimental sock yarn. I'm spinning it into a 2x2 cabled yarn, so I'm spinning an ounce at a time.

While I've gotten better at spinning thicker singles and yarns more recently, it's nice to know that I can still go back to my default superthin singles. My fingers know how to do it so well that I was able to do everything you see on this bobbin last night while watching a (subtitled) foreign film!

Almost Yarn

Just a quick post from me tonight, as it's Sunday and I technically don't quite have yarn to share yet. I did manage to finish all my singles earlier today, and now they are resting before I can ply. As a reminder, I started with this superwash BFL from Bee Mice Elf:

I undid the braid, folded the length of top in half, and broke it apart at the fold line. Then I spun up the two halves. I decided on a two ply because I thought it would keep the colors more distinct. The fiber was such a delight to spin. I started spinning on Friday night, finished up the first bobbin and started the second last night, and then finished the second today -- probably less than four hours of spinning time total. The fiber was prepped so beautifully that it drafted with ease and I went into total autopilot spinning mode.

This fiber was so beautiful as it was spinning up, and unfortunately the really vibrant colors are hidden underneath the top layer of these bobbins. I can't wait to see how this looks plied up!

Over and Done With

I finished the CMF mystery fiber. If you recall, it wasn't spinning very easily for me, so I decided to do a quick-and-dirty spin to finish it. I divided my fiber into thirds, more or less, and spun up some quick singles that were pretty uneven (mostly because I wasn't able to draft evenly with this fiber) and then plied them up in a very quick session yesterday afternoon. Here's the finished yarn:

Given how uneven the singles were, I'm actually pleasantly surprised that the finished yarn looks as nice as it does. Sure, there are still some uneven parts, but overall, it's a pretty round, bouncy three ply. It's also super bulky (at about 6 wraps per inch) and a whopping 94 yards. I don't think I'll be rushing to spin this fiber again, but I will say that by the third bobbin I was starting to get the hang of it. I also managed to do pretty well with my singles control while plying; when I'd finished plying everything, I had about a yard of singles leftover, so I definitely maximized what I had.

I'm quite excited about what is likely to be next on the wheel, which I'm sure will be quite a pleasure to spin. Take a look at this beauty that arrived in Friday's mail:

This is the March/April shipment for the Bee Mice Elf fiber club, a superwash BFL in a colorway called Hazy Days. I'm still undecided as to whether I'm going to spin this as a two ply or a three ply; for now, I'm just content to look at it and pet it!

Crewel World

After two years in the Crown Mountain Farms fiber club, I decided to take a different path for 2013. I got into the Bee Mice Elf fiber club after being on the waiting list and decided to give it a try. This club lasts six months and has three shipments. The first arrived early this month and I was in love with it from the start.

This shipment was Polwarth, my absolute favorite fiber to spin, in a colorway called Crewel World. Rather than going for the obvious and doing a chain ply to keep the color progression distinct, I decided to split the fiber in half and spin a fractal -- so I split the top in half vertically and then split one of the halves in half again. The effect is then that both plies move through the colors in the same order but one of the two moves through the sequence twice and the other moves through it once.

The finished yarn is a little toned down compared to the fiber, but it's just as beautiful.

It's about DK weight and just shy of 200 yards.

As usual, I have no immediate plans for this skein other than to admire it. And I'm okay with that!