Inspinerated

I threatened a blog post on spinning and here it is.  I've been inspinerated for over a year now, and I will tell you that my name is The Cumpulsive Crafter and I am seriously addicted to spinning.  Wheel spinning - spindle spinning.  I love it all.  I started with a spindle and a Craftsy course with some Merino I picked up at Rhinebeck (NY Sheep and Wool). The results were clunky think and thin and awesome!  I've attempted to replicate them many times without result. Spinning with color is fun, gradients, barberpoling (?) striping... Perfecting the technique could take a lifetime, and that's a good thing considering how much fiber I've amassed.  Art yarns are the new frontier for me... Experimentation.  

I've experimented with spinning commercial yarns before.  It's a cheap and easy alternative to for trying out new techniques.  Coils, loops- it's a lot easier to try on some leftover commercial yarn.

 Re spinning or replying yarn is also fun for experimentation.  I used lion Brand Quickie.

As you can see, it is a super bulky roving type plied with a black thread.  It's 22% wool.

So I pulled the thread away from the roving.  

Spinable!  It didn't take me much more than 5 minutes to separate the string from the fluff.

There's a lot of color to the roving, as you can see, unfortunately, when I spun it, it muddied up.  I would take it down to half if I were to do it again.

So I spun it on my wheel; I have an Ashford Joy, using the regular oriface and I have to say it was an easy spin.  Since the roving is commercially prepared, the staple length was very even.

I plied the two singles in a 'z' formation.

You can see that a lot of the color is lost.

So here's the skein.  I probably won't knit  with it, it's a little hairy and I'm not into that, but I got the 3 ounce skein for maybe $4 at Michaels.  Definitely economical, and a cool experiment.  I have some other leftovers, I'm thinking about what I can do with those.   Hmmm...