More adventures in spinning

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These pictures are of what I think I shall call my first successful spinning project – it’s turned out roughly as I planned, and it looks lovely :-) (The tape measure shows centimetres for scale.)

This is the end result of the purple spinning from my last post – the big skein is about 90m of two-ply, and the smaller is about 26m of singles. The plied yarn alternates solid lilac, solid purple, and a candy-cane effect of both. The thickness of the singles and the twist in the ply varies quite a lot, but I still love it. I think it’s probably going to be a hat, because it’s about the right quantity, and because I need a hat that’s a bit more sensible than my current silly pointy hat.

The singles are what was left after I’d filled the spindle with plied yarn – it would take no more, and since I’d plied enough to make a hat, I thought I’d leave the remaining singles. I might use them to trim something, or they might go into the ongoing scrap scarf (which I’ve actually knit some of this week, after being inspired to take it up again by someone on the LJ brit_knits community).

This is my current spinning project. Mostly I’m just trying to spin as thin and as evenly as possible; I’ll decide how to ply it (and what with) and what to knit with it when it’s finished and I can see how well I’ve succeeded. I’m more-or-less getting the hang of drafting now; I started off pulling sections as wide as I wanted from the tops, and hardly drafting at all, which meant it was slow because I had to make lots of joins. Now, I’m starting with a much thicker piece of fibre and thinning it down just before it meets the twist. As far as I can tell from my reading on the subject, this is what I’m supposed to be doing ;-) It’s getting easier, and producing better results, all the time, which is always a nice thing in a new hobby.

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