Fiber Club

The great thing about being in a fiber club is that fiber shows up on your doorstep once a month. Of course the problem with being in a fiber club is that fiber shows up on your doorstep once a month. If you don't spin it, it can pile up. So, last Thursday, after I finished up with the Merino/Angora/Silk singles, I grabbed the February club fiber (I'm in the Spunky Eclectic Fiber Club) which was sitting there and started spinning. It's called Think Spring and it's South African Fine Wool. I have no plans for this fiber, I just decided to spin it heavier than I usually do and as you can see in the finished 3 ply above, it's a chunky, bouncy yarn. It weighs 8 ounces (I get double the fiber each month from the club) and I have 255 yards of it. If I were to knit it up, I would probably get around 12 stitches over 4 inches. I plied it over the weekend and finished it with the Merino/Angora/Silk and it turned out, it was just in time because on Monday, I got this in the mail:
This is half of my 8 ounces of Merino and the colorway is called Mud Season. I haven't started spinning it yet, but I think it's telling me it wants to be spun pretty fine, Navajo plied, and knit into a stripey, soft pair of socks. I need to work on my Navajo plying because I'm not as happy with that as I am with a true 3 ply, so this might be just the thing to practice on.

I had a comment on Monday complementing my finished Merino/Angora/Silk yarn. The commenter said that most of the handspun yarns she sees are more lumpy, bumpy, novelty types, not a smooth, more consistent type of yarn. The great thing about handspinning is that you can make the yarn anyway you want to. You can make a novelty yarn, and there are many books available on different novelty yarns and how to make them, or you can make a more even yarn that closely resembles commercially spun yarns - it's all up to you as the spinner and learning how to set your wheel up and how to do the actual spinning. Don't think that handspinners can only do novelty yarns - handspinners can spin almost every type of yarn there is and for centuries handspinners only spun the more even, tightly twisted yarns because those were the yarns that would wear well. The handspun novelty yarns have only been around for a fairly short time in the history of handspinning because prior to spinning mills (the Industrial Revolution), handspun was the only type of yarn there was.

ETA: In the original post I mistakenly referred to Navajo plying as Andean plying, but I have corrected the post. (One of the downsides of blogging uncaffeinated.) Navajo plying is using a single and chaining it like a giant crochet chain while spinning in the opposite direction from the way the singles were spun and technically isn't plying at all, but a chained single. It gives you the look of a 3 ply, while keeping colors in order and together instead of barber poling. Andean plying is a way of wrapping a bobbin or a spindle's worth of singles around your hand so you can use both ends of the single and ply it together in a two ply. Theoretically, it helps to keep things from getting tangled like they would if you just wound a center pull ball with the singles and plied from both ends at once. In my own (admittedly limited) experience, the only difference between Andean plying on your hand and plying from both ends of a center pull ball is not the tangled mess - that happens to me both ways - but the fact that with Andean plying I have the tangled mess on my hand and invariably this is the time the phone rings, the doorbell rings, Caleb spills a huge amount of food on the floor and Finn goes berserk from all the excitement. For a better explanation of either technique, I suggest Googling.