Finished Some Yarn!

Huzzah!  I finally finished the Ferndale Fiber "Potluck Roving" in Stormy Sea that I bought two summers ago.  Weighed a little over a pound and I have over 700 yards of finished yarn.

Started with three large bobbins of singles.

I triple plied until one of the bobbins ran out, then Navajo plied the rest.  Have to say I was thrilled at how easy the plying went -- my singles broke only twice times during the whole process.

So much yarn, there was no way I was going to skein it using a niddy noddy, so I was forced to buy a swift/skein winder.  So many choices...   I ended up with a Mama Bear Swift with a yarn counter from the Oregon Woodworker.


Although I drooled over the more automated skein winders, no way I could justify plunking down nearly $800 for the electric model I liked best.  Not going to say I loved manually turning this winder, but it was a heck of a lot easier than the niddy noddy and at the rate I spin, I won't lose any sleep over the relatively small amount I spent for it.  And the counter made figuring out my yardage a breeze.



Then I had fun wet-finishing my yarn.  Did the usual soaking in hot water, and used the laundry spinner I bought a couple of years ago when I got excited about dyeing my own fibers.  This is the first time I've really used the spinner other than to make sure it actually worked when I received it.  I have to say I was VERY impressed.  I loaded the skeins while still sopping wet.  It took under a minute to spin out all of the excess water, and the skeins I removed felt dry to the touch.  After slapping them around a little to make the fibers bloom, I hung them up in my garage and they were completely dry within hours.

The model I have is the Laundry Alternative Portable Clothes Dryer.  Lest anyone be misled, it is a spinner only and uses centrifugal force to extract water.  It does not have a heated blower.  Ideal for this purpose.  Only thing I don't like is that the price has gone down since I bought mine.

So here are my finished skeins.  I'm still underspinning a little but much more consistent and I.m happy at how well-balanced the yarn turned out.   Now I have to figure out what to make with it!











This is my first real effort at triple plying.  I found it very easy to keep the tension equal on all three singles, but I would have liked to put a little more spin into the plying.    Here you can see how loosely plied the finished yarn came out.

This is the Navajo plied yarn.  I like the result much better -- apparently I am slow enough at making my chains that I'm get plenty of spin into it.  Or I wonder if it could be the result of the one length of yarn in the chain running opposite to the other two?  At any rate, I enjoyed the process and was thrilled not to have any of my singles break during this part, which is much harder on them than the triple plying.



Before I go, I want to brag (ok, put in a shameless plug) about my friend Michelle's etsy store.  It's called Textile Sanity, and Michelle makes card covers (including custom-sizes) and notecards with free-form felt designs.  She made these custom covers for the Moswalt hand cards that came with Thor.  Much nicer than anything I would have made and I love how she made them work with the big handles attached to the backs of the cards.  Rumor is that she's working on design for blending board covers. Can't wait to see it.