A Beginner’s Adventures in Handspinning

Part 3

I’ve finished spinning my first 2-ply yarn.

Spinning the dyed combed top with my light drop spindle, I got the singles as thin and uniform as I could. It’s still taking me some time to get the rhythm and consistency down. I spun two singles and wound them into balls.

I love the way the singles turned out, and the colors were so fun to work with. However, attempting to ply seemed to catch me off guard, and I didn’t seem to realize how unprepared I was for it. In hindsight, maybe I should have twisted the singles a bit more to assist in a tighter twist while plying. But even as it was, I had a terrible time keeping the balls from unraveling. Setting each ball in a coffee cup, I expected to be able to pull and ply a bit at a time, but the individual balls just kept unwinding beyond my control. Rather than working to draft and ply the singles, I ended up just letting them kind of twist around each other. The end result is fluffy and bulky, because I didn’t have a way to tension or control the strands.

I’m not a fan of bulky yarns usually, and I was a bit disappointed to only get 6 or 7 wraps per inch with this fiber. There’s probably about 2.5 ounces here and it’s only about 40 yards. Still, I think it turned out beautiful!

I was so excited to have finished my first skein, I had to use it right away! I was able to get a small pair of fingerless mittens out of this bulky yarn.