SpinnySpinny

I needed something to work on at the Swedish Christmas Fair, so I dug out some Romney fleece I had sitting around and started on a medium-weight single. It’s really long staple (20 cm) so combing out with the dog brush is fine and it’s fast to spin. Normally demo yarn is total crap but this stuff is so mindless to work with that it’s coming out fine.

I’m finally following through on a project I’ve been talking about for years, spin direction patterns. You can get interesting subtle patterns like checks and stripes in a plain-weave fabric by changing the direction the yarn is spun. Light reflects differently off each yarn and it makes it look like a much more complex fabric.

This was common in early Scandinavian weaving of the Viking era, so I want to do a sample for an upcoming talk at the local Swedish cultural society meeting. I also saw a really nice Peruvian piece at the Textile Museum a few years back, done with 2-ply. It’s one of those interesting techniques that you can only do with handspun because you just can’t buy the right yarn.

So far I’ve gotten almost a full bobbin done Z. It’s not great yarn for me as I’m not much paying attention to size but it will be fine for a sample. I will probably have to do it on the table loom just because the smaller one has less yarn lost to loom waste. That’s a big deal when you are spinning it all.

It’s also using up some fiber I’ll never make a real project from. I bought some of this fleece years ago to use for students and never did anything with it. It’s coarse and not great for clothing, not to mention the annoying canary stain that causes it to all come out vaguely yellowish.