SpinU: Woolen Intensive - 2nd week

The second class of SpinU has come and gone, and I'm still learning new stuff. The homework due for class was to spin a 2-ply yarn out of our singles

The resulting yarn was a very lofty 2-ply yarn (80 yards.

For the second class, we worked on perfecting our woolen joins from both the fold and at the tips of our prepped fiber. In order to see if we were doing the joins correctly, we used alternating black and white merino fiber.

This was not as easy as I had thought or had hoped. Because you allow the twist to go into the fiber, when you join new fiber, you might get a thin & thick spot as the twist works its way through the fiber supply as you pull backwards.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a shot of what I mean. I'm spinning relatively thinner yarn (about fingering weight as a single), so it might not be clearly obvious, but when you ply this yarn back on itself, you can clearly see that there are uneven spots

According to Sandi, we could "cheat" and do a worsted join into our fiber, as the joined fibers would be going in the "correct" direction as woolen spinning. However, for a "true" woolen spun yarn (for the spinning nazis out there), we should learn how to do a good woolen join instead, which becomes more important as you start spinning shorter staple fibers such as cotton, camel, and quivit!

For homework, we continued to work on doing woolen joins and creating a 2-ply yarn so we can really tell if our joins looked good.