Spin U: Third Trimester - Weeks 9-10

Week 9

This week, we continued working on novelty yarn spinning, including core spinning. This part was a lot of fun. We leared how to do turkish knots & beehives. We spun up some silk at a very tight WPI and angle so that we could do these techniques.

Sandy provided some nylon core yarn for which to wrap our spun yarn around.

Turkish Knots &; Beehives

Week 10

As much as I hate knitting with boucle, it turns out that I'm pretty darn good at spinning it. For our homework, we had spun some long wool yarn, which then got turned into boucle for this session.

Boucle

Frosted Yarn

Frosted yarn is essentially a form of novelty yarn where you "frost" yarn with roving, mohair, or other fiber. I don't particularly care for this type of novelty yarn either, but it's good to have the technique down.

Cotton spinning.

Then, it was onto learning how to spin for cotton. Sandy helped us set up our wheels and demonstrated how to spin with cotton. Then gave us homework to spin cotton.

I hates it I do...

I discovered that I dislike spinning cotton. I *could* do it, but do I want to? No. Sandy had us spinning both worsted & woolen. I prefered woolen over worsted, but that's like saying, I'd rather burn my hand versus burning the bottom of my foot. (Honestly, I'd just prefer to avoid both if at all possible). My DH listened to my swear like a drunken sailor the entire time I was spinning.....

I used a cotton top (worsted) & cotton punis (woolen) for spinning. This photo shows the woolen spinning with the cotton punis.

And the resulting yarns?

Worsted Spinning
This form of spinning cotton makes for a VERY HEAVY yarn -- as in rope heavy. The yarn itself doesn't feel like rope, but it is heavy.

Woolen Spinning
Spinning cotton woolen leaves you a much lighter yarn weight for the amount of fiber (which makes sense).

Here they are side by side. You can see how much "denser" the worsted spun yarn (bottom) is compared to the woolen (top)