I am going to give up on apologizing for long lapses in posts. This time, my excuse is very good… Just a career change and move slowing me down. But never fear, I still find time for crafting.
Last month, during Christmas break, I took the kids into downtown Greensboro to visit a local yarn shop. Gate City Yarns had a nice selection of fibers, but don’t get me started on the parking. My daughter expressed a desire to learn to spin, so I purchased some brightly colored wool to learn on. My son is too young to learn to spin, but I had be fair didn’t I? So I let my son pick out some colors for me to spin up into a yarn for him. He chose red and blue.
Recently I’ve had a chance to do some reading. I’ve had this book: The Spinner’s Book of Yarn Designs by Sarah Anderson, for quite a while.
I can’t say enough good things about this book. Apparently, based on the Amazon reviews, I’m not the only one who feels this way. This is not a book for a beginning spinner. While she does go over basic techniques, there are better books for beginners. Her documentation of different advanced techniques is wonderful, and the pictures are very helpful.
So those two things, the red and blue wool, and the unusual spinning recipes in Sarah Anderson’s book came together, and I decided to try spinning a bubble crepe yarn.
Here you can see my control tests. These are spun so that you can refer back to them as you spin to make sure that your gauge and twist remain constant. As you can see I only did so good a job on the bulky red. Spinning a fat single is much harder than spinning a thin. The upper part of the singles have been plied back on themselves to make it easier to see the angle of the twist. So the construction goes as follows. An S spun skinny blue single with about a 30 degree twist. The bulky red is also spun S with about the same amount of twist. These two are plied together in the Z direction but are over-spun with excessive twist (About 60 degrees). Another skinny blue single is spun in the Z direction. The plied yarn is then plied again with the blue single. The varying diameters of the threads give you the bubble effect.
The over-all effect reminded me of Spider-Man’s suit. It’s a neat effect, but I have no idea what I’m going to do with it. That’s the trouble I have with most novelty yarns: I can’t seem to find a project that shows off the beauty of the yarn itself. If anyone has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.