Friday, November 19, 2010

A bit of a tangle - spinning lace weight wool

Lace weight yarn - more than 18 wraps/inch perhaps. That's just a few strands of my woolie cross fleece - maybe 60 - per draft (if my wobbely maths is right). Anyway, tried to maintain that with 1 1/3 ounces of the combed fleece, spinning it at 12 twists per inch. All seemed reasonably well and the the resultant single was wound on the skein winder.
I thought I was being very fastidious, tying it off at intervals every 50 turns in one spot on the skein and just doing 3 figure-of-eights elsewhere. The overly curly mass got a wash and rinse and put back on the skein winder to stretch and dry overnight.
It did this - bone dry next day.
Then the fun started - winding it onto the ball winder! Grrr.
lace wool on winder
Not fastidious enough by a long shot!. The slender little threads seemed to have migrated east and west every chance they got.
I don't mind a few breaks at this point (better now than when using the yarn) but ended up with 2 balls and 6 knots in each.
laceWoolOnWinder
A charming but malevolent pair, about 570 yards of 27-ish wpi yarn:
lace wool in a ball 1.4 oz 27 wpi
Mysteriously, the combed top weighed 1.3 oz, yet the spun yarn weighed 1.4 oz , despite some thinner bits being removed.
Seems one hour of cursing and swearing weighs 0.1 oz?

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Tuesday, November 2, 2010

November blows in

The Trellis and Rose stole dried to my liking:
trellis and rose dry 2
Now another lace knit is "on the rack":
strawberry moose blocked
Sure looks like it's i a torture chamber stretched out with all those pegs!

The indigo with red after wash over-dye is spinning up fairly well - I'm alternating the purplish parts with the more shocking pink so it is striped. Might ply it with a dark green single.
salmon indigo spun
Bad photo - but might remind me later how the yarn came about . There's quite a few mysterious balls and hanks lying about now.