Spindle Obsession

This silk fiber must have been cursed - things just have not gone as well with it as I planned. Not only did I overspin it, but because of the overspinning, I had some problems plying it, and now, even setting the twist didn’t go all that well. I’ve made all the rookie mistakes on this yarn that someone like me that’s been spinning for more than 3 years should not make.

I followed the suggestion by Boogie from Spunky Eclectic on this thread on Ravelry (login required) to set the twist in the silk by steaming it, which I did by putting it in a colander over a pot of boiling water on my stove. The suggestion was great, but unfortunately, my execution was poor in at least two ways:

1. I must have overfilled the pot
2. Instead of staying inside where I could keep an eye on things, I went outside and pulled some weeds in the garden while the pot was boiling.

This is the result of these two errors in judgment.

See those white blotches? The dye almost completely washed out of my silk in the places where it came into contact with the boiling water. Sigh.

The yarn will still be usable - it’s just didn’t turn out as well as I thought it would. It is a bit disappointing, but at least I’ve learned a few lessons about dealing with silk along the way - and maybe someone reading this will be able to avoid my mistakes!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I picket up 2 oz of some beautiful dyed Tussah silk a while back, and I finally got around to trying it out. I chose one of my lighter weight drop spindles to do the job because I wanted to spin it pretty fine.

The spinning itself went okay, although I knew at the time that I was overspinning the fiber a bit. The problems didn’t really start until I started plying.

First I tried using a center-pull ball and plying the center end and the outer end together. No go - it was a big mess! I just ended up with a tangled heap of yarn.

Next I tried taking the center end and the outer end of the center-pull ball and re-rolling it into a double-stranded outer-pull ball. This is the technique I’ve stuck with, and here are the results so far.

Not so good, not so bad, right? I think it’s actually going to look okay, but I’ll know more after setting the twist. The big problem has been that it’s a pain in the @ss to ply because it’s really kinking up, probably because I’m not keeping the singles under good tension when I ply.

Before I try plying overspun singles again, I think I’ll invest in this spindler’s lazy kate. Spinsanity’s idea is genius, don’t you think?

Of course, next time, I’ll also try not to use so much twist in the first place.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!