To ply for

Last poor quality spinning pun title, honest. Well, maybe not but I can't think of any more offhand.

Last week I shared this single, spun from 100g Shetland using a short forward draw.

I was a bit stuck what to do next. Choices were to use it as a single, navajo ply or weigh it and wind half on to a second bobbin.

I posted my dilemma on a Ravelry group and someone suggested making a centre pull ball and Andean plying it.

A bit of a google search showed that this just means plying it with itself. The Andean bit is really a way of winding it to make this easier, using a centre pull ball replaces the winding technique.

I tried it, but I think my ball winder was on the early morning cocktails because I ended up with a very lopsided ball. I figured it would be ok.

Never figure it will be ok.

Within ten second of plying the ends together I had some serious yarn barf. No photos because I couldn't put it down without making the tangle worse.

I wound it into a regular hand wound ball for safety and went back to google.

I was going to try the classic Andean plying, but found this Knitty tutorial for "handy plying" instead. I went with that as it seemed much simpler. 

100g of yarn causes quite a bit of finger pain. Sliding it down to make a bracelet was quite a relief.

Essentially you make a loose centre pull ball and put your wrist through to stop it tangling as you ply. The single comes off easily, making a two ply yarn with no leftover singles.

This ended up fairly thick, not something I usually manage. There is about 55m of 6 WPI yarn, some parts are a little thinner but not overly so.

I think it would be best teamed with another yarn for knitting, maybe a dark chocolate brown.

This is definitely my new favourite plying trick.

Spinning gets a look in

I have, as you will probably have noticed, been joining in with lots of memes and link parties. This is good, it gives me things to write about on days when my brain might be a little slow and lacking in inspiration, but it occured to me that I had not mentioned spinning in a while. So here is some spinning news.

The first half of the Shetland fibre I won on the Chopped Tomatoes blog has been spun into a thin single using my drop spindle (you have seen this picture before as a space filler).

I planned to navajo ply this on my wheel, because I make a mess plying on the spindle and I am sure you need at least four hands to navajo ply on one!

I carefully slid the nice neat spool of single onto a knitting needle in my shoe box lazy kate, and it all started going wrong from there.

The box was not wide enough so it kept jamming and not turning as I pulled the single up towards the wheel. Without thinking I decided to pull the needle out of the centre and just work from the singles sausage.

Spinners of a sensitive nature may wish to look away now!

Ugh- tangles!

It is not quite as bad as it looks, it is not overly tangled for the most part, but it is very slow going as it has to be carefully unrolled, then ply a length, then repeat. I think this will take a long time to finish, but I will spend a few hours on it this weekend and hopefully make some progress.

Tour de fleece day 9

Today has been another busy day, I had hoped to get loads of spinning done this weekend, but it has not turned out that way. However, I have managed to navajo ply the alpaca and baby alpaca from the last few days.

I used my wheel to navajo ply the singles. Today's learning experience was taking the single off the spindle shaft to make a singles sausage rather than trying to ply off the spindle or having to widn a plying ball; and the fact that sliding it on to a knitting needle is much easier and ends up with less tangles.

There's about 26g of alpaca (the chocolate brown) and 32g of baby alpaca. The baby alpaca is much softer than the alpaca, after the tour de fleece I might buy enough to make a decent sized project.