Spinning, again and again

It seems to me that I've spent more time on spinning than knitting/crocheting these months. I am still knitting something, but it's much behind my schedule. Luckily it's not my plan to make any handknit presents for the Christmas so I can do that very casually. :)

I've finished spinning all the singles of the batt purchased from butterfly girl designs in Glacier Lake. It's made with 70% Superwash Merino, 20% bamboo, 10% firestar, and less than 1% angelina. Because of the firestar and angelina, there are actually quite a lot of glitz inside. I have not yet taken a photo on it but there're really a lot. The batt is soft, and a dream to spin with, but I encountered my bottleneck when I started spinning. The bamboo and merino are of different stable length and it was hard to get these two fibres blend well during spinning. I read on the web and then switched to spinning from the fold, and it worked!

I planned to do a 2-ply on the yarn and pictures will be up by then!!

Spinning again

It's October.

October is a good month because it's Socktoberfest! Which, means, a lot of sales for yarn and fibre stuff are going on! I purchased a several skeins of yarn from Knit it up recommended by Amy, and added a grab bag for samples for her spinning fibres. Yea, I think I got somewhat addicted to spinning.

There are 3 little skeins of delicious fibres in the grab bag: merino/tencel, merino/bamboo and merino/cashmere. To my surprise, all of them are unbelievably soft! I just cannot resist the temptation and started spinnign the merino/tencel top at the middle with colourway "stained glass".

Because of the tencel, it's so easy to draft and because of the limited amount of fibre, I decided to draft as thin as I can so as to obtain a decent yardage. After spinning up all the singles, I decided to try my first 2 ply. I roughly divide the fibre into 2 equal portions and wind it tightly to 2 balls to do the plying because I don't have a lazy kate. And, it works! It's lovely!

Since the singles are a little bit too fine and possibly I didn't give enough twist at some locations, the yarn broke for a few times during the plying. Despite of all these, the final products are so lovely. I didn't weigh the fibre and the yarn but I estimated there should be 0.5 oz out of the total weight of 1.5oz in the grab bag. A total of 136 yards of laceweight yarn was obtained. And I was wondering what I can do with that amount of yarn?

I make yarn!

Yay! Finally I make yarn! This is the roving bought from squoosh fibres with 50/50 merino/silk. I really do not have much idea in spinning so I just do whatever I want to.


The singles come out to be lace weight, and then I navajo plied it and it becomes a 3-ply stuff (of course!) and it becomes a fingering weight yarn! Yes! yarn!!



And a close up!

It comes out to be approximately 370metres using the whole 4 oz roving. It's of a longer yardage than normal fingering yarn, which makes the yarn so squishy and lovely! I was pretty surprised of the outcome. Although there are spots of uneven spinning or unbalanced plying, it's still lovely! :) I am so proud of this!

New Potential Addiction

One of my best friends, Amy, was having her birthday in 18 May. And as a good friend of her, I decided to buy her a spinning kit that she might be interested. And, of course, in order to save shipping, I buy one for myself. :) A pretty good excuses for making a purchase right?

The spinning kit from Maine Woods Yarn & Fibre includes a maple wood top whorl spindle, 4.5 oz of fibre in three different colours and a small roving in white for practice. I have never come to this kind of stuff before, and spinning is obviously not a common thing in Hong Kong, I seek my help from the brilliant, lovely WWW.

I read a lot of youtube videos and tutorials online. Blogs are often the place where people share what they did, and of course I wouldn't miss the chance. After a day's work, I got these:

This single ply are very fine (in my opinion), and will be plied together using Navajo Plying.

Now, it's being wound into a ball and let the twist die before I start plying. And I go back to my knitting again. I am so excited on what it will become.