look i made a yarn

[telophase]

a bigger yarn this time





26 yards of plied handspun yarn. As yarn, it is terrible* but it is mine. I washed it and blocked it to set the twist and kill the overspin. I gather that blocking is something you want to do if you're going to weave it, and something you don't want to do if you're going to knit it, because the resulting item will then have to be blocked every time you wash the item, but it was going to be impossible to knit otherwise. And Toby has said he'll happily attempt to knit something with it. All I can say is: "Good luck and Godspeed!" And whatever it is will be nice and small, given how little yarn there is. Perhaps a small potholder or mat.

Closer up:


And here is my new spinning toy, one of these, which allows you to spin with a stick. The yarn cop is now getting large enough I'll going to have to wind it off because it's getting a little more difficult to spin with it. So far, advantage: I can sit back in my chair and spin much more easily with this than the drop spindle, disadvantage: I have to wind off much sooner than the drop spindle.



I'm attempting to work on making the thickness more consistent, which is a bit easier with this thinger because you only spin a few inches at a time before winding it on, whereas the drop spindle allows you to spin a couple of feet before doing that.



* If you're frantically scrolling down to the comments to tell me something like "But people are making and selling yarn just like it in the store!" no, it's not: this has seriously inconsistent twist (if you look closely you can see where it's kinking up a bit where it's overspun) and is probably going to be hell to knit. If yarn just like this is getting sold, the buyer is getting ripped off.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Well it's better than anything I've spun, anyway. I grant that's not much.)

[telophase]

Thanks! :) I'd say it's better than anything I've previously done, but what I'd previously done was a very small hank done under the supervision of the woman who taught me two year ago, which I expect is probably better. But it's lost somewhere in my office, so I can't be sure. It's certainly not plied.

[solarbird]

A friend of mine for a while got into combing her own wool and dying and everything, pretty much every step of all of this, and it reminds me of some of her first batches. (And yeah, some of that will be hell to knit.)

But it's just practice and she quite enjoyed it. Then she had two kids and a lot of stuff went OKAY BYE FOR NOW. XD

[telophase]

I think the hardest part is working on getting the twist consistent. :/

[solarbird]

She got decent with a drop spindle, but got pretty good once she got an actual wheel. That angular momentum is important.

I used some of her early yarn in a sculpture project.

[lady_ganesh]

You can always felt it once knitted. ;-)

[telophase]

XD