07.16.07

One Week and One Goal Down

Posted in spinning at 4:56 pm by wendy

(btw, pretend I wrote and posted this Saturday. We’re dog&house sitting for my dad out in East Bumfork and dialup.just.can’t.handle.it. so I’ve been snatching post composing & uploading time here and there between Work and Home and Schtuff.)

Done with the sock yarn!

(click for bigger)

7.5 oz/212 grams and 468 yards/428 meters

about 14 wraps per inch….which means this is some really dense yarn.

predrafted and ready to go…

Fastidious predrafting was a necessity to preserve the color blocks and minimise mixing and muddying just in the singles. Usually with superwash top, most top really, I just open up the end like a fan and spin back and forth across it and work my way down. I end up with a fairly light lofty yarn, despite the worsted prep and semi-worsted drafting I do. But this superwash felt coarser and was much grabbier along the length of the top, spinning across the fanned width of it just didn’t work.

So that was good, actually, I changed up my spinning style a bit to adapt to the material being spun. Gasp!

First bobbin…

I bought this roving at the Black Sheep Gathering “tradeshow” from the ladies of the Blue Moon Fiber Arts booth (also snagged a “mill end” mediumweight unlabeled colorway skein and a lightweight skein in ‘Fire on the Mountain’ colorway superwash sock yarn, ‘cuz I wanna see what all the fuss is about).

I didn’t really get to talk to them because they were distracted by a lady doing a total hard-sell approach to offloading angora bunnies. Seriously, this woman was shameless, using her kid and everything, and just not taking no for an answer.

I wondered if she did the same thing at every booth. (If you went, you saw her fliers everywhere.)
It was a little strange.

Anyway, this roving is from their Sheep 2 Shoe kit, and at $30 for 8.5 oz of superwash merino…well, I bought it just to see. I was intrigued by the promise of instructions inside to spin to the specification of Blue Moon’s sock yarn. I just thought it was terribly clever packaging, simple but lovely.

When I opened the bag, my nose was hit with the strong -pow!- of vinegar and wool. Sweet alchemic ambrosia smell that it is, but I was a little surprised.

I always rinse out my fibers and yarns after dyeing, it’s just another doublecheck that all dye is set and as it should be, but maybe I’ll stop.

After all, wool loves being acid, and as long as you are sure that all dye has been absorbed, there’s really no reason to do it, it’s just another step using more water, time, and energy, and can further disorganize the roving/top, (superwash merino is especially tricky because it is so slippery; the stuff I have is so slick when wet, it feels like snot. seriously. And it slides everywhere, you have to handle it very carefully. If you add some twist to it, it behaves much better through the process, but if you forget…oy.)

So what do you guys think? Final rinse or no?
When I left it in my tent and came back to it in the heat of the afternoon there was a ton of condensation in the bag, and I ended up spreading it all out so it could finish drying.

There are a lot of possible reasons for moisture in the bag (it could have been humid in the shop it was packed in, felt dry but wasn’t quite, for one) and the moisture didn’t affect the instructions and certainly not the superwash, so no harm, no foul.

But it is a good reminder that if you are storing stuff in plastic (even just those plastic tubs) you should try your best to make sure it’s dry, and put some moisture absorber in there with it (I’ve heard sticks of chalk will work, haven’t tried it myself) since in sealed plastic it has noplace to go, and if I’d stored it for awhile before getting around to spinning it, it could have been icky. But hey, it’s Blue Moon–it doesn’t stay stash for long.
Anyway, I’m not sure how much I can say about the instructions, but I didn’t follow them to the letter. Partly because the math of it didn’t add up. The wraps per inch range for the singles would have been too fat to get the desired thickness of the three ply, although it must have worked for them or they wouldn’t have printed it as part of the instructions.

I spun a single ranging between 32 and 36 wraps per inch and plied with a high angle of twist to get the sportweight yarn (on the heavy side at 14 wpi) which was in the range for the end product. I also spun the singles with a lot more twist than I usually do, so I could ply with extreme prejudice. Yo.

I separated the roving into equal lengths, hoping to get the same repeat of color within so I could get some bold striping in the knit piece, but no luck there.

But you can see that there were similar colors that ended up together, so there’s some muddy sections, some gradiating sections, and some nicely coordinated together plies that will make for a more interesting knit than just the same ol’ same ol’ bold stripe thing.

Once again, serendipity and reality collide and kick “what I thought I wanted”s right in the nadgers…but in a good way.
So, yep, that’s it. One goal down. I’m spinning up the possum-merino and have a fair amount, but much much more to go…and then a long long way to ply.

The latest installment in the That Can’t Possibly Be Comfortable, or How Can They Sleep Like That series (hi Rena!):

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