Kathryn Ivy

May 08, 2007 - Posted by Grace Schnebly

Spin the Nile

Deep purple, orange, and turquoise handspun!

Newest handspun yarn still on the spindle.This is what I did yesterday afternoon. I finally spun some of the wool I got off ebay. I figured this place was starting to get a little too crowded with roving, and I needed a break from knitting anyways. I love the colors in this, and the way it spun up was totally surprising to me (probably just because I am a noob though). The yarn alternates between candy striped deep purple, orange, and turquoise sections, and predominantly turquoise or purple sections. It is actually a self striping yarn, because each of the sections are pretty much the same length. I could hardly put my spindle down because spinning this was so much fun! Working with exciting colors definitely makes spinning more satisfying…

Wound onto the swift.I spun this on my Ashford top whorl drop spindle until it was overloaded with yarn and couldn’t hold anymore. I wound it onto my swift so I could prepare it for setting the twist and skeining. I don’t have a niddy-noddy, but this works just fine. The swift makes it really easy to measure yardage too because you just count the number of wraps and the circumference. I ended up spinning 163 yds, which is by far my longest skein so far. I still have half of the roving left too! I will probably spin the rest of that up tonight then set the twist on both of them together. I spun it to be mostly worsted weight, but it varies between heavy worsted and light worsted. This is by far my favorite yarn that I have spun so far!

Does anyone have any good advice on how to set the twist for single plied yarns? Do you do it under tension, and if so how? I am a little lost at this step, and I really don’t want to mess this one up!!