Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Spinning Batts

When I first start spinning, I purchased a 3-month club membership from Butterfly Girl Designs, and each month I got a spindle and batt.



This one is called Starlight, Starbright. It's 3.5 ounces of 57% merino, 33% bamboo, and 10% nylon firestar. Isn't it pretty?


However, there is one small problem with this type of batt. All of the fiber are layered (bamboo sitting ontop of merino sitting ontop of the nylon). Because it's not blended thoroughly, spinning it can prove prickly and problematic, as I discovered when I spun one of the first batts I got from her.


The resulting yarn was lovely, but I did have a hard time spinning it, as I would get chunks of just bamboo or chunks of merino or chunks of firestar.



I didn't want to spin the other batts until I felt I got better spinning-wise or learned how to better deal with spinning from such a batt.

After taking the SpinU classes from Sandy, she taught us how to overcome these problems, simply by better blending the batt with either handcards or a drumcarder. The resulting batt isn't as "pretty" as the layered batt, but it would spin easier.

As this batt was 3.5 oz,  I headed over to my LYS, where they let me use their drumcarder to better blend the fibers.


And, they are spinning up quite nicely now. I'm currently spinning them woolen on my Ashford Traddy. I'll post photos of the finished singles once I'm done with them.

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