Up Close and Personal

I have this idea that I will understand my spinning better if I understand the nature of the fiber I'm spinning.  Is it smooth?  Heavily cuticled? Crimpy?

So a few months ago, I bought a Celestron digital microscope (the least expensive one!) so I could get a closeup look.

Can't say that I've learned anything yet, but I've been having fun looking at all kinds of stuff close up.  The most intriguing so far is skin, but I won't gross you out with photos of that.

Know what this is?  No, it is not a closeup of the pores on my nose! Find out at the end of this post.

 In my Wednesday night class, we've been talking about adding Angelina fibers to some of our spinning, and I placed an order for everyone who wanted to try it.  This is the smooth stuff -- can't wait till the crimped stuff arrives and I can see what it "really" looks like.






Then I got out my second (most recent) finished batch of handspun.  This was some fiber I got really cheap on ebay.  Proof that you get what you pay for.  I have no idea what it really is, except the burn test showed it was wool.  This was so hard to spin, I was tempted a few times to burn test the whole bunch.  But impatience is one of my biggest faults so I decided to stick it out as a character-building experience.  On the plus side, this was so difficult to spin, all of the other fibers I have experimented with since then have seemed incredibly easy to draft.

Here's the original unspun fiber:

Normal Size

Enlarged

REALLY Enlarged

No wonder I couldn't draft this stuff smoothly -- it was so curly and the fibers twisted around each other so much, there's no way a beginner like me could get anything remotely uniform for a result.  And each of the colors had a slightly different texture -- you can see here that the pink stuff was slightly thicker and quite a bit less curly than the white.  The green doesn't really show well here, but it's somewhere between the white and pink.  So every time there was a change in the colors during drafting, the thickness of the yarn really wanted to (and did) change.  Hence, VOILA!  Art yarn!

8.3 oz, 264 yards of finished yarn.

Here it is in increasingly closer views:

I'm actually pretty pleased with the result given what I started out with, and am just waiting for the yarn to tell me what it wants to be.

The honeycomb picture at the top of this post?  A photo I snapped accidentally while the microscope was sitting on my table.  Here's the wood a little bit less magnified.  I would never have guessed if I hadn't seen it first-hand.