So I'm A Cheater
knitsbyjenn
Jenn here. Again. ChainChix is giving me free reign to fill up her blog with my randomness and today I thought I'd confess one of my (many) shortcomings.
I'm a mediocre spinner. Oh sure, I do okay. When I spin in a public setting, where Non-Spinners can see me, I impress the snot out of them. Its a real kick! I almost always have an encounter that goes sort of like this:
Non-Spinner: Oh my God! That's so cool.
Me: Yes
Non-Spinner: Are you making yarn?
Me: Yes
Non-Spinner: ... You make it look easy... but its not huh? Is it.... hard? Its, like, super hard right?
Me: Yes
Non-Spinner: I bet you are really talented and awesome, and secretly the Earth Mother in disguise aren't you?
Me: Yes.
Well, maybe they don't say that last part. Out loud. But the Non-Spinner usually does look at me as if I have preformed a magic trick right in front of their eyes. That's a nice boost for the ego but the truth is I can do just enough to get by. I spin most animal fibers in a decent sort of way and I can ply, Navajo ply, etc. Essentially I can make usable, knit-able, crochet-able yarn and that was the original goal all those many years ago when I was cussing at my very first drop spindle and making... not yarn.
But I can't spin a balanced single and I LOVE singles. Puffy, soft, bouncy single ply yarn is my absolute favorite yarn to work with. I have tired to get better and I have done some reading and research and.... have you noticed that people who write about the technical aspects spinning are math obsessed geeks? Me too.
So I gave up trying to get better and just figured out how to cheat to get what I wanted.
I start by spinning (duh). I only concentrate enough to make it thickness (or grist) that I want. In this instance I want a thick-and-thin that averages out to worsted weight. I don't worry about twist. In fact, I can't really get too fancy or precise about how I spin because I live with the Anti-Spinning Feline Over-Lord, otherwise known as Bodacious.
(Two seconds later, that just-spun yarn had been chewed through.
I just spin and draft at a rate that comes natural to me, which turns out to be waaaaay to much twist. My singles are very, very twisty and I make skeins that look like this:
Those little curls are cute but if you ever tired to knit with yarn that "energized" you'll be in for a lot of frustration. And cussing. And ripping back. And giving up.
So this is were I start my cheating. I give the skeins and long soak and then dry to set that twist in good and then I do something I call "air-ply" to take the over-twist back out. I've found that if I do the air-ply without the soak, the yarn untwists and separates.
I soak in lukewarm water with just a few drops of Eucalan. The soak is more than just a quick dip. Put those skeins in and leave them in. They need to be fully saturated with water, sunk to the bottom of the sink, with no air bubbles left when you press them down.
Then gently (gently gently!) I wring them out, open up the skein into its circle and give it a few snaps before setting it out to dry. I don't use any weights, just let gravity pull the yarn straight down.
In the Texas summer sun, skeins take only 90 seconds a few hours to be completely dry. At this point I bring it inside with great hope that the "hard" bath treatment will have taken care of it the over-twist for me. Sometimes it does..
..but not this time. Which I should have known because, before I could even get a good look at the yarn, the Anti-Spinning Feline Over-Lord was rolling on top of the skeins, shedding cat hair all over them. If she is still interfering and slowing me down, I must not be done.
Now the "air-plying". I like to ply from balls rather than bobbins. Its a habit from my drop-spindle days. I feel like plying from balls gives me more control but its only a personal preference. Do it however you are most comfortable. After winding into a ball (or back on a bobbin), I start to ply... against nothing but air. I'm turning the wheel in the counter-clockwise, in the S-twist direction, just like I do when I'm making a two- or three-ply yarn. But in this case I've only got the one ply. After I made up my clever "air-ply" name, a spinner who saw me doing it called it back spinning. Okay. So maybe I wasn't the first person to dream this fix up but no one told me about it (lol) and I had to think of it all on my own. So I get to name it.
Don't air-ply too much or the single ply will pull apart in your hands. I use the lowest speed and set my tension for medium take up. I put in just enough backspin to make it go from this:
to this:
Afterwards I've got a nice puffy, not-over-twisted, single ply yarn.
The final test to see if I'm done, finished, no more work needed, is to offer the skeins to the evil one...
...and she has no interest in them Can't wake up, can't be bothered, can't even come out of the mangled cardboard box that I have to keep because its her favorite napping place.
So I must be done! Groovy.
It would probably be easy and quicker if I could just learn to not over-spin my singles in the first place. I'll get around to that someday. But for now I have to figure out what to make with 500 yds of worsted weight thick-and-thin single ply yarn. Its time to spend a few hours on ravelry.
Me, the Anti-Spinning Feline Over-Lord, and her sidekick Cowardly Disappearing Boy-Cat live in Austin. I knit, crochet, and spin. And I teach knitting, crocheting and spinning. And you can find me on ravlery as Ryt.