Handspun

Last September at the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival I picked up this lovely roving for $10.



There is just a little hang tag which is hand written and says "color: sea mist, 70% merino, 30% Tussah silk" so I can't tell you who the vendor was.  Probably best for my wallet that I can't remember.  The colors are carded together so beautifully and subtly.  I immediately got the yarn onto the spinning wheel.



I spun up one whole bobbin, then it sat... (totally unlike me to leave a project mid way through huh?  I'm never like that, I totally always stick with things to the end... cough... on an unrelated note, Ryan may have called me a "sock slut" yesterday... I think the exact comment was "you're totally not a real slut, but you are a sock slut" in that same voice you use with the know-it-all who is standing before you swearing up and down that they are most certainly not a know-it-all in any way, shape, or form, they just test well, and memorize easily, and you know, learn things fast.)

I blame school for this particular abandonment.  Since I'm still new at spinning it takes me quite a while to acclimate to the wheel find the right treadling speed, the right way to hold my hands to make drafting easier, etc. so if I'm going to spin I like to have a big chunk of time to work at it.  Big chunks of time aren't easy to come by with a law school schedule, hence the not so much spinning.  If you are thinking to yourself: "If you just took those small amounts of time to practice you would get better and learn to be productive in those smaller time allotments," you can hush.

Once school ended I got back on the wheel and quickly filled the second bobbin.  Here are the singles.



I divided the 4oz of roving before I started into two 2oz pieces thinking this would give me a chance at getting roughly the same amount of yarn on each bobbin.  Here is the finished yarn.



The puny little skein is the amount that was left on one bobbin when the other was used up.  I wound it into a ball on my ball winder then plied it against itself pulling from the center and outside of the ball.  Plied it's about 32 yards which means that I had 64 yards more on one bobbin than the other.  They say (whoever "they" are) that beginning spinners tend to start by spinning bulkier yarns and as they settle into the rhythm begin to spin finer and finer.  This seems to have been the case here.



I love the color, "Sea Mist" is the perfect name for the colorway.  I also love the shininess from the silk.  It does make it hard to get an accurate picture though.  It's more muted than it shows here, some of that shine is just the camera.


Isn't my WPI tool cute?

This yarn is pretty consistent (especially for only being my second adventure in wheel-spinning) most of it is about 17 wraps per inch.  The internet is telling me that this is even finer than a standard fingering weight, but it looks like to me more like a heavy fingering to a sport weight.  Do you find the WIP guide to be an accurate comparison to machine made yarn sizes? Maybe I "squished" my yarn together a bit when measuring.  Anyone know what tension the wraps are supposed to be done at?

In the end I ended up with about 326 yards of 2-ply in the fingering-sport range.  There are a few places (not too many) where the singles got over energized and corkscrewed and there are a few places that were under-plied but overall I'm really happy with how this turned out.

Now comes the peril of trying to find the perfect pattern for it.  Any suggestions?