As promised, a picture of the finished Hiker. I am finally more or less pleased with how it turned out. Washing it was a little emotional as it suddenly stretched itself out of all proportion! A quick corralling with the help of a tape measure though and it started to look a little better. What never ceases to amaze me though is the transformation that takes place as a piece drys. In this case, when the yarn was wet it almost shrank in on itself in terms of loft, resulting in a horribly open looking piece of material. As it dried though, the stitches gradually filled out as the yarn fluffed up again. Now I just have the wait to find out if the recipient is happy with it... fingers crossed.
My other completed piece of work has been the laceweight,Waves Breaking, a 50g bag of merino/silk that I bought at Woolfest a couple of weeks ago. For the princely sum of £1.75 it instantly became my second skein's worth of practice fluff. While I was plying it I could see a distinct difference in the first 100m or so of the singles that I'd spun but after that it was fairly even. The plying seems to have balanced out most of the variations in thickness and a quick thwacking during the setting process did wonders for the slight overspin.
As with the first First Phoenix it was a bit of a learning curve. Getting the drafting fine enough was not as hard as I had expected, even if I did put the "drop" in drop spindle on a number of occasions. With singles this fine and long though I didn't even contemplate Andean bracelet plying it! Instead I treated myself to a lazy kate from the Spinning Weal along with two bobbins. As things worked out the first half almost filled the spindle in terms of what I was happy to continue to spin with, meaning I could wind it off onto a bobbin without worrying too much about joins. First lesson learnt was to never ever ever just take the cop off the spindle... cue an utter yarn barf by the end!
Anyway I ended up with both bobbins about a third full and set off plying them. I just used a simple 2 ply method, holding both singles together whilst spinning the spindle in the opposite direction to the singles. I'm a flick spindler rather than a thigh rolling one, so I could get a good meter or so plied in each run. That said it still took about 5 hours to ply the lot. Most impressive (even if I do say so myself :) ) was the amount I managed to cram onto one spindle:
In lieu of a niddy noddy I wound the skein around my feet (has the advantage that I can pull my feet together to release the skein rather than getting it stuck on a chair!) then gave it a quick soak in some Eucalan. A couple of thwacks against the side of the bath and a night hung up in the airing cupboard resulted in this:
All in all, for my second ever skein I was pretty happy. Hopefully I can work on getting the singles a little more even before I try my hand at some silk.
My other completed piece of work has been the laceweight,Waves Breaking, a 50g bag of merino/silk that I bought at Woolfest a couple of weeks ago. For the princely sum of £1.75 it instantly became my second skein's worth of practice fluff. While I was plying it I could see a distinct difference in the first 100m or so of the singles that I'd spun but after that it was fairly even. The plying seems to have balanced out most of the variations in thickness and a quick thwacking during the setting process did wonders for the slight overspin.
As with the first First Phoenix it was a bit of a learning curve. Getting the drafting fine enough was not as hard as I had expected, even if I did put the "drop" in drop spindle on a number of occasions. With singles this fine and long though I didn't even contemplate Andean bracelet plying it! Instead I treated myself to a lazy kate from the Spinning Weal along with two bobbins. As things worked out the first half almost filled the spindle in terms of what I was happy to continue to spin with, meaning I could wind it off onto a bobbin without worrying too much about joins. First lesson learnt was to never ever ever just take the cop off the spindle... cue an utter yarn barf by the end!
Anyway I ended up with both bobbins about a third full and set off plying them. I just used a simple 2 ply method, holding both singles together whilst spinning the spindle in the opposite direction to the singles. I'm a flick spindler rather than a thigh rolling one, so I could get a good meter or so plied in each run. That said it still took about 5 hours to ply the lot. Most impressive (even if I do say so myself :) ) was the amount I managed to cram onto one spindle:
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