Knit Sisters

Hey, thanks everyone for your wishes for a speedy recovery!  I believe it helped.  (Or perhaps it was all the time I spent lying in bed.)  In any case, I am, if not fully recovered, well on my way.  (Although, I also believe Lorinda was right and that gifts of roving would not only make me feel much better, but would also help my immune system fight off future attacks upon it.)

In answer to Deb’s question in the comments, yes indeed you may use a Barbara Walker stitch pattern!  No need to reinvent the wheel, as it were.

I have been working on spinning the lime green superwash.  I finally finished spinning all the combed wool and started plying it.  The attentive among you may remember that I wanted to insert tufts of the waste wool from the combs into the two-ply as I plied it.  I started doing that last night.  Wow.  That was seriously cool.  And addictive.  I finished up a bobbin in no time.

                                    Look at that!  Doesn’t it remind you of your fun and crazy aunt sitting beside all the rest of the staid and conventional relatives? 

 

The only problem I ran into was that it took me a relatively long time to insert the tufts, and so the two-ply got a bit over-plied.  I thought about plying it back onto itself as a cabled yarn, but I really wanted to maximize my yardage.  I came up with a few different solutions:  ply it with another single spun from a different roving or fiber, ply it with a commercial yarn, leave it as is and hope it would relax a bit when washed.  I finally remembered a light green rayon ribbon yarn that has been aging in the stash for a while.  Wouldn’t that look cool, to add a little bit of shine to the yarn?

Here’s the result:

 

Here’s a fairly cruddy closeup:

Unfortunately, the very thing that makes this ribbon yarn so beautiful makes it really hard to photograph.  It reflects the light amazingly.  I once made a scarf for a friend out of this yarn, which turned out looking gorgeous.  But, this yarn also has a tendency to pull easily, so the next time I saw her with the scarf it wasn’t quite as gorgeous-looking with all the little pulls poking out of it.  But, plying it with the tufted wool yarn should ameliorate that problem, right?

In any case, I think it looks really great.  (Nothing like blowing your own horn, huh?)  Harvey said, “That looks awesome!”  You don’t get higher praise than that from a ten-year-old.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Spinning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.