lisettedeboer, 1 month ago

@handspinning Started making a pouf in Tunisian #crochet of the #handspun . Almost done with one skein and lots to go. Did plying and finishing for skein no. 3 today.

Axiom, 4 months ago

First skein (155yds) of the #HandSpunHandKnit sweater!

This is the back panel, about 1/3 done.

If this piece takes 3 skeins then I'm screwed, since I'll only have 7 skeins, roughly, for the whole project 😬 I guess I could always get more fiber if I had to, but I'd rather not 🤞 still hoping it all works out in the end

#HandSpunYarn #HandSpun #knitting #FiberArts
@handspinning @knitting @fiberarts

Paws2Trail, 5 months ago

Here are attempts #1 and #2.

I first started going as thick as I thought I could: I'd love a soft, fluffy husky yarn! But I wasn't sure how well it would hold together with the short staple length. AS you can see it's possible, but tricky to work with. It kind of looks like fluffy udon noodles!

For the second trial I went thinner, with more twist to help hold things together. Drafting even thickness is difficult! Fiber carding/preparation is a challenging topic for another post. You can especially see the unevenness in the lower right of the first image, showing the underside of the spindle.

The first photo here shows initial single-ply spinning. Then, I plied each on itself into doubles to see how they'd respond, both in texture and strength. You an really see the uneven ply thickness in places!

One handy thing about the Turkish spindle is that it creates a center-pull ball you can use to ply from both ends at once, again using the same spindle to wind it all together.

#handspun

Another grid of yarn, but this time it has been plied into 2-ply. The top two correspond to the loose, thick yarn on the top of the previous image and is very fluffy and unstructured. The bottom two correspond to the bottom two images on the previous image; they are more tightly spun, but still somewhat loose and fluffy, and you can see that the thickness of individual plies, side by side, can be very uneven in thickness.

Paws2Trail, 5 months ago

It's time to continue the 🧵 thread on spinning husky yarn! since the last update, I've experimented with:

• e-spinning on the EEW Nano 2
• washing & setting spin on early experiments
• hand-winding center-pull balls
• continued spinning on the Turkish spindle

Read on...

#spinning #HandSpun #FiberArts #chiengora

Paws2Trail, 5 months ago

Perhaps most surprisingly, I've continued to spin on the Turkish spindle and have come to find it a more relaxing, meditative process than the urgency of keeping up with the e-spinner. It's much easier now to get consistent, even thickness and spin, and it just looks so pretty wound neatly around the spindle.

This completes the fur I've prepared so far. I can't bear to unwind this spindle just yet! Time to switch back to the e-spinner for my next project.

...which involves digging out fur we've collected from previous, sadly-departed huskies and making yarn from them. My goal is to ply together all our huskies into a single yarn to knit scarves or hats or something.

More on that when this 🧵 thread resumes!

#spinning #HandSpun #cheingora

A slightly different angle of the previous photo of yarn on a Turkish spindle showing god's-eye type patterns.
More yarn on a Turkish spindle! This time the winding pattern is nearly full across the surface, creating a curved square of parallel lines. Out of focus in the background lies Gypsy a husky who is one of the sources of fiber for the yarn.
View of the bottom of a nearly-full Turkish spindle ball, showing a square window-like pattern created by wrapping around the cross-arms of the spindle.

Paws2Trail, 4 months ago

🐺 🧶 🔀 🧵 Time to continue the husky yarn spinning thread!

Previously, I'd practiced spinning & plying on my Turkish spindle. Now it's time to practice plying with the new EEW Nano e-spinner.

This is my first practice spool on the Nano, which I'd washed & set, then wound into a center pull ball. That allows you to 2-ply from a single ball, drawing from the inside & outside at the same time.

The bottom shows the 2-ply on the left side. Because my yarn was pretty uneven, you often get areas of loose fluff wound with a tight thin strand. I thought the 1st try was rather loose (3rd 📷) so I sent it through the spinner a 2nd time to add more twist (4th 📷), which I believe helped.

The right side is Navajo 3-ply, a neat technique I wanted to try using one end of a single strand. You create a series of loops (basic crochet chain, but LONG loops) that twist into a 3-strand yarn. It tends to be more even b/c you're plying the same stretch of yarn against itself.

#spinning #HandSpun #cheingora

Crop of a photo of various yarn balls and spool, focusing on one ball that has thinner yarn than the others, though still somewhat uneven in strand thickness.
A small, 2oz bobbin held sideways that has been divided into halves, left and right, with a divider down the middle. The left side shows 2-ply husky yarn that is quite variable in thickness overall and within individual strands. Some ply is quite loose. The right side shows Navajo triple-ply yarn, more evenly and tightly wound together, and overall generally thicker and denser. The husky Gypsy is out of focus in the background.
The same bobbin of husky yarn as the previous photo, but the left side 2-ply yarn has been re-spun into a tighter coil.

Paws2Trail, 4 months ago

🧵 Continuing the husky yarn thread!

I've broken into the rest of our ~20yr collection of husky fur, which fills the three tubs seen here. My plan is to combine yarn for each so that we end up with a 3-ply yarn from each of the huskies we've had over the years. Most will be done on the Nano e-spinner.

But! I'd forgotten that one of our huskies had a grayish undercoat in places, and found it compressed at the bottom of the oldest bag of fur.

I could have just blended it in, but instead I kept it separate to create a distinctly gray yarn. It is special and limited (that's all of it combed into punis in the 3rd photo), so I'm hand spinning it on the Turkish spindle. It's turning into a wonderful heather gray yarn that will be a great accent next to the white!

#Spinning #HandSpun #Cheingora

One of the tubs from the previous photo, lid removed, showing that the husky fur inside is white on the right, but a light gray mixed with tufts of white on the left.
Two clear plastic bins side-by-side organizing punis, long cigar-shaped rolls of combed fur ready for spinning. The group on the left are white, while the ones on the right are a striated heather gray.
The beginnings of a Turkish spindle on which the heather gray husk fur is being wound as single-ply spun wool. It criss-crosses the arms of the spindle in layers of god's eye patterns.

Paws2Trail, 4 months ago

For those who like spinning minutiae, an update on the various plied yarns in the previous post to this thread:

I've since washed and set the yarn, which gave a chance to appreciate the minor variations in the different plying styles and yarn thicknesses while wound on the frame/niddy-noddy. I then wound them up again into balls, with a little more care for neatness this time.

The differences are subtle at a distance. I like them both! Next: to decide what to do with them.

[Yikes, sorry for any edit notices, but one typo was just too egregious to leave.]

#Spinning #HandSpun #Cheingora

Closeup of the thick/thin 2-ply yarn at the top of the frame in the previous photo, showing the combination of fluffy and neat yarn twisted together in contrast to one another.
Closeup of the middle yarn from the first photo, showing the neat even twists of the Navajo triple-ply method, creating dense, even strands twisted together.
Five balls of yarn. In the back, a very loose, chunky and fluffy ball next to a slightly more refined, but still somewhat thick and fluffy ball. In the foreground, three balls, two larger and one smaller, from the previous photos' yarns. Left to right are the even Navajo triple-ply, the uneven thick/thin double-ply, and the smaller even double-ply, made from a portion of the Turkish spindle yarn that was most consistent on the thicker end.

Paws2Trail, 12 days ago

Has it really been almost 4 months since our last husky yarn update‽ Much of that time has been quiet, but things are starting to spin up again, as it were!

In that time I've completed spinning all of Rio's heather gray fur onto a baseball (softball?) sized winding around the Turkish spindle. It's so pretty and precious I still haven't done anything more with it.

I've also completed e-spinning one 2-oz bobbin of yarn from each of the three tubs of fur, representing 5 separate huskies we've had over the years.

My goal has been to ply all three bobbins together to create a triple-ply yarn of all our huskies in one. But herein lies a problem! Each bobbin holds 2 oz of yarn: how to ply all 3 together without breaking it into 3 more separate strands? I want to keep the yarn as continuous as possible...

#Spinning #HandSpun #Cheingora

A close-up of the Turkish spindle from the previous photo. It consists of two wood cross-pieces at the base of a central round staff, resulting in a weighted spinning element around which yarn can be wound as it is spun. The heather gray yarn forms a neat series of angular overlapping regions, reminiscent of "god's eye" yarn art.
A view of the bottom of the Turkish spindle and yarn. Here there is less precise alignment, with the strands creating a square grid with rounded corners. In the background, out of focus, is a white husky, Gypsy. R.I.P!