The Heathen Housewife

I’ve been getting a good sprinkling of questions lately about the details of my spinning experience, and I figure that if a few people are e-mailing me, maybe a few more would be interested in some of the answers I’ve been giving out in private e-mails. I’ll also note for what feels like the millionth time that it is SO much easier to answer an e-mail or comment when the person in question gives me their contact information, and that you are not likely to get a response if you don’t. Because no matter how much I might like to, I don’t know how to find your e-mail address if you don’t give it to me!

Anyway, Jacqui from the UK is a good example of a typical question. She asked:

I love the spinning that you do and would like to ask how you make the gorgeous skeins from the colourful roving? I can see you have the roving in a basket and you spin it but can I ask – do you split the roving first to make it thinner and do you just spin the colours as they come to end up with such lovely yarn? I have just bought a spinning wheel, which I should have in my home tomorrow. I am so looking forward to playing around and teaching myself to spin (I can just about make yarn on a drop spindle). What I am really aiming for is for hanks of wool which resemble in some fashion the gorgeous ones that you make.

Here’s what I wrote back to her, plus a few additions for links and stuff.

Hi, Jacqui! Thanks for your sweet e-mail. Congratulations on getting your new wheel! Boy, you have asked a complicated question. I’ll do my best to answer it.

First, don’t expect too much of yourself with the first skein you make on your wheel. In fact, you may want to sit with the wheel and practice just treadling it without any yarn for a while before you try to spin, and then you might want to practice feeding pre-made yarn onto the wheel a couple times before you try to create your own yarn. It’s good that you’ve learned first on a drop spindle – knowing how to draft the wool makes it a lot easier.

Well, about how I draft the wool, the answer is that it depends. The most recent project that I started is some really cool roving with very long color repeats – the rainbow stuff. I want to maintain those color repeats, so I split the roving lengthwise only once – in half – and then I did a little pre-drafting with each half. By that I mean, I just shook it out a bit, then ran it across my lap from one pile to another, giving little tugs at each spot as it passed through my hands to loosen up the fibers a bit. And then I’m drafting directly from that onto the wheel. In this case, I am planning to Navajo or chain-ply the yarn to keep the colors all together while achieving a 3-ply.

As for my other projects – well, it depends on a bunch of factors like my mood, how easily the fiber drafts, how thick the original roving is, how long the color repeats are, and how I think I might ply it at the get-go. If the color repeats are quite short, I might not strip apart the roving at all – unless the colors play really well together and I’m looking for a really random barber-pole effect. The stickier the wool, the more likely I have been to strip it pretty thin and be sure to pre-draft.

I am by no means an expert spinner! I got my first drop spindle only last May (2008!) (and editing to add that I think it’s hilarious the titles of my posts related to it are A New Obsession and Oh, Yes I DO Have a Problem), and I bought my wheel in June. Go back to May in my blog and take a look at the crappy orange yarn I made on my first attempt, and you’ll see what I mean. The biggest thing I have focused on in the beginning and still do is to get a nice, even single without any blobs or huge variations in thickness. Somehow, it seems that the colors tend to work themselves out if I can do that.

Oh! And one more thing. I looked at a lot of books for good background information, and I think that has helped me immensely. I recommend:

The Ashford Book of Spinning by Anne Field (specific to Ashfords, but lots of good information that applies to spinning in general)

Spinning in the Old Way by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts (this one is specific to drop spindles, but what you learn about drafting and plying here transfers directly to the wheel)

Start Spinning by Maggie Casey

And the quite new The Intentional Spinner by Judith MacKenzie McCuin

If those aren’t enough, Adlen Amos’ Big Book will keep you busy and give you tons of food for thought after that.

I have at least as many more books on spinning as I’ve listed above, and checked even more than that out from my library. Many of them have good information, and there is even Color in Spinning by Deb Menz, which might be appealing to you in your search for the perfect combination of colors. I really do have to give huge credit to the dyers from whom I buy my roving. They are the ones who come up with the awesome color combinations!

Here are a few that I’ve enjoyed spinning:

Fiber Optic Yarns (lots of awesome there, and she often has pencil rovings that I think would be good for beginners.)

Crown Mountain Farms has a huge selection of fibers, both natural and dyed. They have great customer service and good prices. I loved that I was able to buy a sweaters’ worth of BFL in the color I wanted, and that they dyed it for me and got it to me in the mail in less than a week without fuss.

Squoosh is another nice etsy seller, as is Cloudlover69.

Creatively Dyed is awesome too.

Alright. Does that cover it? Any more questions? I’m going to try something I don’t usually do on this post. Go ahead. Ask me any question related to spinning, in a comment on this post, and I will do my best to answer it either in a comment below or if it’s long or requiring photos or links maybe in an edit to this post.

Now, I’m off to the library with my kids and then back to make dinner and knit some more on that sweater. I keep trying it on every few rows at this point both to check fit and admire it. This one might even be fairworthy!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 28th, 2009 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.