Thursday, January 15, 2009

More on the Third Spin -- Thick/Thin/Slubby HELLL!

Maybe this is too far advanced for me, at least with this particular fiber. It's a wool mix, and extraordinarily spongy. Yet it compresses more than you'd think. Only sometimes though. Sometimes it compresses less than you'd think. (This is where experience would come in really handy!)
Yet still, I persist.
I'm getting the idea that one way to go about this would be to just not let the yarn get too thin. I wasn't guarding against that last night, or when I first picked it up this morning, but I've returned to it with the thought that my thin parts ought to be thicker than I've been letting them be.

The big problem with thick/thin is that the spin gravitates toward the thin. It gets overspun. Meanwhile, the thicker parts don't... well, MAYBE they don't, get enough spin. So I'm now thinking if I try for less of a difference between the extremes of thick/thin, that may help.

Drafting this fiber is also full of challenges. In some ways it acts like a long staple length (you need a longer draft zone) yet in others, it acts like it doesn't (will drift apart easier than I'd expect.)

Challenging!! Yet I have the feeling if I can pull this off, it'll be a lot of learning curve under my belt. I haven't yet figured out whether I'm going to get the hang of this anytime soon (expensive fiber to experiment with) or whether I should abandon the thick/thin/slubby idea, and just go for making the goal of a consistent yet fairly thick yarn. This fiber will spin thin, definitely. But I think it would lose some of its character, or at least the character that I see in it.

This will be an ongoing learning thing, and one I won't want to lose track of, so I may just keep adding to this post.

1 comment:

Jenny said...

I think the less you try, the more slubby the yarn will be. I think the more you try, the more you'll learn about spinning a consistent yarn. So if you want slubby, try less. If you want consistent, try more.

But that's just me. I don't put the thought into it that you do, I just spin and see what comes out.

Love you!