I plied the tiny cotton, I didn’t like how it looked as a two-ply so I’ve decided to take it and four ply that. So I gave it a lot of twist and wound it off to measure. I’m really close, so I have to wind bobbins by length to make sure I ply every last bit of it. And, yes, there is about 550m of two-ply there, about what I guessed. There is only a little bit of the original single left so I was even very close on that. This brown cotton is combed, but there is still a lot of short fiber and a little trash in there and that makes it impossible to get a really even yarn. And in a two-ply, every little bit of variation shows. I still had the other multiple ply medium cotton to do, so I decided to use it for that. With an eight-ply, it all evens out.
I did the spinning wheel yarn in a day, I just have to measure and wind the skein. It’s fine enough that I’d rather not put it on the swift, so I took it from setting the twist on the skein winder to a ball. It’s something like 60 wraps per inch, that makes it extra fine. It’s basically the same single as the Andean weaving yarn but with a little less twist. I didn’t sort the Romney for color this time and the lighter color fibers tend to be slightly longer than the dark, so the color gently shades from dark to light with each comb batch. It’s an interesting effect that makes a semi-random narrow stripe warp, but it’s not so good for weft. The shorter length of each back and forth pass of the weft means large blocks of color.
Next is going to be the blend two-ply, I think. I did the mohair and wool on the drum carder a few days ago, the bamboo and tencel has been sitting around for a while. I have a lot of things to finish, I’m going to do as much spinning as possible next week when The Boyfriend is out of town on business.
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