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The finished skein averages between 16 and 18 WPI (not as uniform as I am usually capable of) and should knit up beautifully.
I have 7 more pounds, in various colours. Heh. Yummy, super soft, lustrous, and washable!
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Superwash Merino 2ply
2 plyed Superwash Merino handspun. I purchased the mill ends (not rovings, but a hodge podge of pieces and strips from a mill --- all spinnable with very little prep.) from ebay seller: "shpherder". I believe I paid $4US a POUND for this. Even including shipping it worked out to only about $5 Canadian for a pound. It is very slippery and a little difficult to control during spinning, but the end results are quite beautiful. She also sells actual rovings at a higher price....likely easier to spin.
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The finished skein averages between 16 and 18 WPI (not as uniform as I am usually capable of) and should knit up beautifully.
I have 7 more pounds, in various colours. Heh. Yummy, super soft, lustrous, and washable!
<
The finished skein averages between 16 and 18 WPI (not as uniform as I am usually capable of) and should knit up beautifully.
I have 7 more pounds, in various colours. Heh. Yummy, super soft, lustrous, and washable!
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4 comments:
It looks fabulous!
Did you do any pre-drafting? I find it's easier to spin straight out of the bag without any prep. I'm not getting anything very uniform either, but I'm still new. LOL
Gorgeous! And you made it yourself. "We're not worthy, we're not worthy...." :)
I didn't exactly "predraft" Michelle, but I had such a wide variety of "chunks and slivers" that I sorted it some. I straightened out any long, thin slivers and spun them directly, drafting as I went. I pulled fiber lengths from the messier blobs and spun them tip to tip, more or less. For the thicker strips which were more like roving, I split them into thinner pieces and spun that way. In a second bag I've come across big wide flat pieces --- but with all the fibers parallel -- and I've had great success just starting at one corner by pulling out a few fibers and spinning away. They seem quite willing to slide out in an orderly fashion! It's an experience for sure.
I feel kind of good spinning up what otherwise might have ended up as a form of industrial waste. I'm glad we have a Canadian supplier willing to collect it all, sort it, and sell it at a reasonable cost.
If I remember right, "laps" is the word for it. The Jaggerspun mill once sold, to a friend of my sister's, a large quantity of the fiber that goes into their Zephyr yarn, 50/50 tussah silk/merino, that the mill equipment had choked on. They had had to turn the machinery off and pull the stuff out, some of it with black oil spilled on it, most not, but it wasn't worth what it would have cost them to sort through the stuff. So they just put it all aside and sold it off to a dealer, cheap--my sister's friend--who then sold it to my spinning guild at eight bucks a pound. It took quite a bit more than the usual spinning effort, with chunks and blobs and odd bits, and we spent a lot of time sorting and having to toss just a bit of it out (the black oil part), but far and away the majority of it was well worth it. We got some really nice yarn out of it for so very little money.
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