Spinning soft, fat yarn #1

Remember the colorful roving I wrote about a couple of days ago? 

(Hand shown for scale.)
I've spent some time working with it.   Here's what I did.

Based on an idea I got from Katie when she was in the shop last week, I decided to try teasing or fanning out the roving horizontally first:

One hand on the yarn, one hand on the camera, alas.  Just imagine holding the roving in both hands.  I start from the right side as I'm looking at it, and just start teasing the fibers apart.  I ended up with this:

The unteased roving is on the left, the teased is on the right.  So you can see how much it opens up.  Then I divided that batt-like fiber in half -- just tore the strip down the middle, thus:

Then I started at one end of the batt-like fiber and started gently tugging on it lengthwise.  This also loosens the fibers and lets them slide against each other more easily.  Finished product of that process looks like roving again, except it's now much less dense and much more open.

If you do a bunch of fiber at a time, you can roll your strips into little balls like this, ready to pick up and spin:

Here it is being spun.  Notice how far back I'm holding the roving from where the twist is entering the fiber.  I'm holding the fiber 6-7 inches back.

There's still an issue with barberpolling, though:

I think this may be partly because the color changes on this roving are pretty close together.

The finished skein looks like this:

It's about 10 wraps per inch.  It still has a little more twist than I want in my soft fat yarn.  If I can find my protractor, I'll make a twist angle gauge.  This is one of those things I've wanted to do for a while and never got around to.  If I know what the angle of the twist in my singles yarn is, I'll be able to keep some records and know more exactly how much twist I can use before I get biasing fabric knitted from the yarn.

This stuff is fun, y'all.  I've still got a couple of ounces of that roving left.  I may try to do something different with the rest of it.  Stay tuned!

Comments

[Rebekah]

Oh I like the finished skein very much. I'll be anxiously waiting for the next installment.

[jenifleur]

Hey you don't have to make one, my husband did it for us. I have a .pdf you can print out here: http://www.knottygirls.com/jenlablog/freepatterns/twistanglegauge.pdf

That's for someday when I learn how to use my wheel.

Also, I like barberpoling-does that make me stupid and wrong?

[Katie C RAOK]

YOu can try this also. When you spin out a "S" twist instead of the "z" tiwst and this will make it a little softer. You also can spin it on the bulky ratio and spin slower and this works good for me.

[Jane]

Looks good from here!

[Mouse]

ooh.. that looks gorgeous! Are you going to ply it or just leave it as is? I'd like to see it tonight if you are coming to SNB if you could bring it along? :)