Episode 118: Charollais singles, Lava Love on Panda & more on socks

Thank you for joining us this week! Welcome to new and returning viewers. I appreciate your time spent watching the show. Please make sure you join the Ravelry group here. Thank you for your continued patronage, Patreon community. We will be celebrating our Patreon Anniversary of 3 years (!!) in June – please stay tuned for more. In this weeks show, we discuss the Breed & Colour Studies that the community has been working away on in the background. Thank you for all of your sharing. I share some progress on the sampling process of my Shetland – I have spun up a 3-ply yarn that I quite like. I share some finished yarns – three to be specific and I’ve even started knitting with one of them! Lastly, we look at some yarn that was shared in the Spinning Growth thread and chat about how colours muddy. Enjoy the show!

Announcements

Unbraided – EBOOKS available here & book orders can be made here.

Breed & Colour Studies

• adawson (Inne)’s plan is to spin singles for both 2- and 3-ply light and dark yarn for a mini-study; mentions that there won’t be enough to do a project but I wonder if she’ll be able to combine the yarns into something; then the yarns finished – middle is combination of the light and dark (one single of each for a 2-ply). Beautiful!
• Lykkemeg (Megan)’s finished art batts from last episode are finished! She spun woollen on her Lendrum at 10:1 and 2-plied the yarns. Amazing swatches!

Works in Progress

CraftyJaks Panda – Lava Love

• Majacraft Suzie, 27:1
• High twist; spinning off the top, smooth worsted
• Socks – crepe yarn
• Tons of sheen, smooth texture
• Knitting up on 2.00mm needles

Finished Objects

Swaledale Singles

• Spun on Lendrum DT with minimal twist, ensured twist locked
• For project with Teeswater singles but too much breakage so abandoned
• Much kemp

CraftyJaks Charollais – gradient batt

• Singles, spun thin for plan to chain-ply
• Moderate twist
• Fulled – hot & cold water with soap

Spinning Growth

Enediyne (Tracey) says:

Just finished my first sock spin and although I’m very happy with the spinning and consistency of the plied yarn, the colour is lacklustre.

It was such a nicely coloured braid, with 5-6”+ sections of colour and I divided evenly into thirds (even used my scale) for each ply. Each third was divided into quarters and spun starting at the same end.

I was hoping that the colours would match up better than they did. The resulting yarn is overall rusty orange, still pretty, but the nice teal is lost. As I was spinning, because the BFL staple length was so long, there was some mixing as I was drafting, which muted the singles somewhat.

I’m pretty certain that I would have ended up with the yarn I wanted if I had spun the thirds without further striping them down. Much more likely that the colours would match. Pulling off chunks of each individual colour and spinning from that instead of down the whole braid would probably have helped too.

Oh well, live and learn!

• Can be so heartbreaking when the colours in the original braid don’t come through as you’d hoped they would – esp. when they become muted or muddied
• Think about chain ply versus a traditional spin
• Limit stripping down, rather keep colours intact with long repeats – better change they will match up together
• Gradient would have worked well to keep the colours together in longer repeats – placed them in an order then spun that order to 2 or 3 bobbins or chain-plied

Housekeeping

• April & May – sponsored by Westcoast Colour (Lynn)
  1. Discuss your favourite patterns for handspun in the episode thread here.
  2. Prairiebirdfire (Sherri) – post no. 48 (blues & greens)
  3. 2^nd braid of fibre – purples (Episode 117): tomatl (Kelly) – post no. 8
• Calendars:
  1. Breed & Colour Studies – from finished yarns thread; Post 43 – 2ndzephyr (Tamar)
  2. 51 Yarns SAL chatter thread – Post 149 (lykkemeg – Megan) & 398 (rebbiejaye – Rebecca)
• 51 Yarns SAL – working through true worsted & woollen yarns at the moment. Monthly teaching Vlog goes through my experiments for the month & Thoughtful Spinner chronicles my breed choices and yarns.
• Support the Show for small business owners – information on the blog and/or email me directly for more
• Newsletter for Wool n’ Spinning
  1. Helps to let everyone know about upcoming dates for the community all in one space
  2. Access the sign-up on the blog in the bar at the top of the page
  3. Published once per month