Fraternal

Fraternal skeins: a spinning experiment.

Here we have Tarnished (Southern Cross Fibre), Salt Collecting (Southern Cross Fibre) and Prisms (HelloYarn) – all on Polwarth.

I’ve always been partial to three-ply yarns – they are so round, bouncy and generally pleasing and interesting to look at. Along with Spin365, David of Southern Cross Fibre has had other challenges he’s posted to his Ravelry forum. One of which was a “combo” challenge – the challenge was to spin up a combination yarn – and specifially there was a challenge to try combination drafting. In my case, I opted to combo spin two skeins from the same fiber, using two different methods.

To combination draft, the idea is to split up the fiber and diz or hold together the component colorways while spinning a single strand of yarn comprised of all three colorways. Dizzing the fiber helps keep the three colorways together.

First I started by splitting up my fiber into thin strips:

I then grabbed one strand from each color, held them together and pulled them through my diz and wound them into little bundles for spinning:

I then spun away, producing a relatively uniform in thickness single ply yarn….that had the look of a multiple ply yarn due to the striping present from the three colorways:

I thought they looked most interesting straight off the bobbin, while still energized:

For the fraternal skein, I spun each colorway onto its own bobbin and plied it up as a regular three ply. One colorway was split in half and spun end to end, the next was split into 4 lengthwise pieces and spun, and the last was split into 8 lengthwise pieces – if this was done with a single colorway, I’d call it fractal spinning.

Here’s the post bath beauty shot:

and finally, the two skeins together:

Similar, yet different. Neat, don’t you think?