Cabled Scales – a 4-ply experiment

Well.

We can safely say that I’m not so good about maintaining a blog….I’m also not terribly good about staying on the Spin365 bandwagon, but I can safely say that I have been spinning a heck of a lot more than I have in previous years.

One of the more recent experiments was triggered by a challenge posted by Amy of SpunkyEclectic in her Ravelry Group – the challenge? Cable Plying.  What is cable plying?  Well…it’s basically strands of plied yarn plied together.  Knitty actually has a pretty good explanation of the process.

For my yarn, I prepared the yarn as I would for a fractal spin – two bobbins with longer color runs and two bobbins with shorter runs – total of 8 ounces of fiber.  Only split it across 4 bobbins because I am still working on being able to comfortably get 4 ounces of fiber packed onto my matchless bobbins…me and the wheel are still not quite friends when it comes to getting the tensioning just so for double drive spinning 😉

Here were the singles – prepped to turn into a fractal 2-ply (along with a nice big coffee and Game of Thrones Season 3 to keep me entertained for the plying party)

Here we have the bobbin loaded with the fractal 2-ply.  I did try to add extra twist to the yarn, knowing that I was getting ready to ply it back on itself – Unfortunately, I didn’t add sufficient twist – or perhaps my penchant for lower twist singles was against me from the beginning.  Another spinner can probably tell from the twist angle in the yarn that this two-ply wasn’t heavily energized….

In any case, after plying, I reeled off the yarn into a plying cake:

And I plied it back on itself from either end:

You might notice that it is difficult to tell that this is a 4-ply cable yarn – it was fairly energized after the final ply, which tells me it was not balanced.  I anticipate I’ll be trying this again with some more fiber….focusing on getting more twist into the singles and in the first round of plying to hopefully get a cable yarn that pops nicely on the final round of plying.

Have you cable plied before?  Have any tips for me?