The last thing I Spun I tried to spin as chunky as possible... This time I'm going as thin as possible. I had the strand break a few times... maybe too much pressure pulling in? I dyed some KnitPicks Full Circle Roving with Cherry Kool Aid for this project (hence the name thin cherry red!) My plan was also to try N-plying the yarn (a method of creating a 3-ply yarn out of a single strand.)
I am spinning this so thin that I decided to break the roving down in to what is basically pencil roving. This is much easier to manage and I get fewer bumps in the yarn.
I am still spinning on the slowest whorl, I move to the faster and could manage it but I don't mind treddeling a little faster if I want more speed at this point. This is going much slower than my other spinning projects, but I am assuming this is becaues I'm getting so much more yardage!
Towards the end, maybe I was getting sloppy but I kept breaking the yarn a lot more. Hopefully everything holds up when I start plying!
N-plying is much easier than it looks. I found a great N-plying tutorial that was super helpful. It is almost like spinning a really long crochet chain with mega elongated stitches.
I split the yarn a few times when plying, but this is around where the yarn was splitting when I was spinning anyway.
The 3 ply yarn is beautiful, but it is funny. Because the color is so dark, it is hard to tell that it is multi-ply at all. On the spindle, it almost looks like single ply.
However if you look closely then you can see the different colors and tell that it is a multi-ply yarn. This is much more balanced than the two ply yarns I've created before, PLUS it is rounder than 2-ply. If not for the fact that it eats up yardage I would do this every time I spin!
162 wraps = 216 yards. This means that I would have had over 600 yards on singles! I didn't measure the WPI of the singles, but I'm guessing that they were close to lace weight just based on the yardage. This yarn is 17 WPI and therefore Sport weight. Wahoo! I am improving. I could still stand to add a little less twist over all, so I will need to work on this in my next endeavor
What roving did I use for this spinning? I overdyed charcoal grey roving with Cherry Kool Aid. I had no idea what I was going to happen when I started with this experiment, but I am very pleased with the final results. The following video wills how exactly what I did. Isn't my yarn beautiful?
Spinning Finished 1/15/12
