Spinning out the year

Southern Cross Fibre, Trickster on Polwarth – October 2012 club offering

As the year winds to a close, I thought I’d break out some fiber and get cozy with my traditional spinning wheel again and I’m sure glad I did 🙂 she spins so nicely and with a quiet chatter as we go along.  I forget sometimes how different wheels have different behaviors and characteristics especially since I’ve been in the habit of spinning on my electronic wheel for so long.

My Minstrel is set up to spin double drive, and it seems it’s been a while since I’ve spun on her since I had her set up on the slowest whorl.  Either that or I was spinning a longer staple wool or a bulkier yarn….after a bit of fussing at first and switching to the slightly faster setting on the whorl that was attached to the flyer we’ve been making smooth progress 🙂

The plan is to make a 2-ply yarn where the singles will hopefully match each other well enough to maintain the color sequence of the originally dyed fiber once plied together.  To prep, I split the fiber in half down its entire length – unfortunately the split wasn’t quite even as one half was 59g and the other wound up at 53g.  In an attempt to get them better matched weight-wise, I split each half at its midway point and swapping the ends of each grouping.  Final weight for the fiber designated for each bobbin wound up fairly even at 56 and 57g, respectively.  We’ll see how it all looks when the plies come together…stay tuned!

first bobbin of the pair completed