Thursday, September 7, 2017

Summary of my first Live Spin-Along!

At the beginning of August, I held a Live Spin-Along on the ChemKnits Tutorials YouTube Channel where I spun an entire 2-ply yarn on camera over the course of 6 episodes.  When I testing out going live I asked you what you wanted to see, and someone asked me to do some spinning live.  In this first spin-along, I spun roving from two different ChemKnits videos, Breaking Wilton's Violet Food Coloring for Speckled Roving and Dip Dyeing Braided Roving with Wilton's Violet Food Coloring.

I have a playlist for the whole spin along, but you can also watch the whole series embedded here in this post.

In the first video, I introduced the spinning project and talked a bit about the tools that I use for spinning.  My spinning wheel is a Kromski Fantasia and I LOVE it.  I consider myself a novice spinner but I found it really easy to learn with "Sandry" as my instrument.


In the second episode, I let the viewers pick which roving I would start spinning.  The dip dyed braid was the overwhelming winner. I spun almost all of this fiber in this episode.  Unfortunately comments during the YouTube Livestream don't show up in the final video. I try to keep track of questions I get during the video and post relevant links as soon as the replay is done processing.


In the third episode, I finish spinning the first set of singles and start spinning the speckled roving. Both rovings have similar colors (although one is a base of Full Circle Roving in Pigeon and the other is Bare Wool of the Andes Roving) since they were both dyed with Wilton's Violet food coloring.  However, the singles are quite different because the dip dyed roving gave us longer color repeats than the speckle dyed roving.  


In the 4th part of this series I completed the 2-ply yarn.  Plying yarn is so much faster and requires so much less attention than drafting.  I find that it is a lot harder to make mistakes.  Of course, when I started doing some N-plying I discovered that I couldn't really talk, focus on keeping my hands in camera and ply at the same time.  I'll try to do another N-ply demonstration sometime in the future.  



Finally, in the conclusion of this series I share the finished yarn and talk about some of the stats from this project.  I spun two Z singles and combined them in an S 2-ply yarn.  I created a few yards of an N-plyed yarn with the leftover singles.



The finished yarn: 
Big Skein - 90 wraps = 360 feet = 120 yards
Small Skein - 20 wraps = 80 feet = 26.7 yards

With over 140 yards of yarn I have more than enough to make a hat!  The 2-ply yarn is ~10 wpi, or worsted weight

The small skein of N-ply yarn - 5.5 wraps (~2 ft/wrap) = 11 ft = 3.7 yards.  This means that I had 11 more yards of the dip dyed yarn than the speckled yarn.  This isn't so bad if you consider how many yards I spun to begin with.

Along with these series, I made a bonus Time Lapse video.  Thank you, Jake for making this request!




 What would you like to watch me do live?  I leave most of my videos pretty long and unedited so you guys can see more of the dyeing process, but there are certainly some moments that I leave out.  Make sure that you subscribe to the ChemKnits Tutorials YouTube Channel so you can get notifications for when I go live.


This post contains some Amazon Affiliate links. None of the product selections or opinions were solicited.