Remember I was prepping for a Hello Yarn combination spin with some roving I’d made on my drumcarder? And I did a little video of prepping for it? I’ve chatted about it on the vlog almost every week and then I was de-railed by having to send out my flyers and whorls to Schacht? After receiving my parts back from Schacht (all working with excellent customer service), I was able to blast through the remainder of the spin!
The two bobbins next to each other were really beautiful. Along with the Merino, BFL and Corriedale, I threw in Silk Noil, Sari Silk, Pulled Silk, Firestar and Angelina in with the blended batts. I think this created a lovely textured yarn without taking away from the colours in the original combed top from Hello Yarn. I needed to clear off my bobbins to make room for another project, even though I’d been kind of saving it to ply on my Mach III that is to be delivered at the end of August. I could have placed the yarn on storage bobbins (which would have taken a fraction of the time it took to ply) but I decided to ply it instead.
I don’t want to complain too much about how long this took to ply since the finished yardage is over 650 yards. It ended up being a lot of yarn. I have two phat* skeins of yarn!
*phat (adjective; describing word for a nouns – here, yarn): cool, pretty hot, tempting
Intentionally, I kept the plying looser. The singles were spun at 18:1 to keep the singles high twist. In an effort to enhance the puffiness and bounce (sproing) of the yarn, I kept the plying lower twist. This will enhance a lace pattern, which I’m hoping to use for this yarn. The YOs will really POP! with a lower twist in the plies. This is classic commercial lace yarn that one would buy off the shelf in a LYS. I haven’t calculate the final stats on this yarn but I think it is a light fingering and roughly 1500YPP. The twists per inch look to be about 3-4 and an angle of 30 degrees. I’m looking forward to swatching this over the course of this week.
I personally like my yarns to come off my wheel twisting a few times (at least) but this came off already balanced. After finishing (washing and snapping), I’d say that it’s almost slightly under-balanced. This was the case with my Polwarth + Silk from SweetGeorgia Yarns. I overdyed that yarn and knit it into a Featherweight Cardigan. It made an amazing fabric!
There is way more yellow in this than I had anticipated, which is a lovely surprise since it is my favourite colour. I love the red-brown throughout the yarn that adds depth. And the green has ended up being a lovely evergreen/teal-green in various places. I’m excited to knit with this into the Fall.
One last texture photo:
All-in-all, this combination spin turned out really well. I love the results. This is a technique I’m excited to try again in the near future.
Happy Spinning!
-r.
