Spinning and Felting

After my triumphant cast off of the winterwonderland sweater it was time to get back to something a little less successful . . . spinning. I had two spindles of single ply that I had spun back in New York, but never plied. I was going to try to keep the natural color a single ply since it was kind of spun thickly (not on purpose, I just still kind of suck at spinning). I asked one of the spinners at Chicks with Sticks and she told me that I should soak the ply and then kind of whip it against the side of the tub (like snapping a towel) to let the twist shift down from the over twisted parts to the under twisted parts. That did NOT work out well for me. It’s really over twisted, so what I got was a horrible twisted mess.

Here it is wet

And dry

I could have stretched it out to “set the twist” and hung a weight on it, but I’ve been warned that any single ply that is too overly twisted would just twist right up again when the knitted garment got wet. So. . . I gave up and decided to ply it. Since I didn’t have that much and I didn’t know exactly how to evenly divide it into two spools, I decided to try the Andean Plying method. A wicked cool little way to ply a double from a single ply. Here’s my hand in the midst of spooling it up getting ready to ply

Here’s the ball of plied yarn. A little chunkier then I wanted, but what the heck.

It’s only about 55 yards. I don’t really know what to do with it. I also plied my more successful purple roving that my pal Francesca got for me from Rhinebeck. That’s about 45 yards. I suppose I could do something using them both. Maybe gloves with the purple used as edging.

Any ideas? Any patterns?

Come on knitting readers help me out with what I could do with 55 yards of natural wool and 45 yards of dyed wool mohair.

Here is the beautiful purple, blue wool, mohair

I bought 4 oz of the “almost solid” series from Spunky Eclectic. I got a kind of purple mix that I thought would go well with the stuff I already spun. Maybe I can figure out something to do with them together.

I also bought 8 0z of a really cool wool, mohair, alpaca blend. It is mostly grey with some little bits of color. I’m not at all sure what kind yardage 8 oz spins into.

How do you spinners decide what to knit out of what you spin? I’m still not sure how to figure that. I must buy a niddy noddy to help me accurately figure out yardage.

In the world of knitting, I cast on two new projects. One fast (yeah US 15 needles) and one that will take forever (boo US 6 needles). For the instant gratification project, I’m knitting up a wool market bag for felting. I’m used to felted objects being large, but this is HUGE. I’m just finishing up the straps, and it is the size of my love seat. Hopefully it will felt down to a nice size. I’ll post a finished pic next time.