First Wheelspun

19 October 2006

Some pictures and a quick description of my first two wheelspun yarns.

Well I managed to produce two balls of yarn already on the wheel. It took me a few days to spin what would ordinarily take a couple of weeks. Here they are:

Yarn Number One is made with a sample size of "Karaoke" fibre from Ecoyarns. It is 50% wool and 50% soy silk and was dyed in rainbow colours. I chain plied it and it's a little uneven due to the fact that I was experimenting greatly with how much I was treadling and fiddling with the tension. In some places it was so loose it just broke when I plied it. It knit up nicely, though, and I was pretty pleased with it.

Yarn Number Two was an experiment in plying two completely different singles yarns together. In the sample pack I got from Ecoyarns, there was a small bit of Merino wool mixed with possum fur. New Zealand is overrun by non-native possums and when they are culled, the fur is used for clothing. Some of the people in my spinning class mentioned that they had ethical issues with using fibre from animals that were killed. Personally, having grown up in the National Park Service & seeing what destruction non-native species can wreak on rare and beautiful wildlife, I don't really have an issue with it. However, I'm not sure that the texture of this particular fibre blend is really for me. I spun up the Merino/Possum, practicing a technique called spinning from the fold. It is very loose and uneven and fluffy that way. Then I spun up some soy silk and silk latte as thinly and evenly as I could, and plied the two together. The result was fairly attractive, I thought, especially with the cool grey of one blending in with the yellowy tones of the other.

Also a small bit of English Leicester that I spun up in class. We were practicing spinning thickly, and I feel like I did pretty well on the thick part, but it's not really evenly thick.