Monday, May 31, 2010

It's the "Week of the Big Fat Singles"

Just a definition (in case you googled "big fat singles" and were not expecting a knitting and spinning blog). A singles is the individual ply you get when spinning fluff into yarn. Sometimes it is combined by plying with additional singles to get a multi-ply yarn, sometimes it's left on it's own and turned into other fibery things without plying.

For those of you who know what a singles is, I'm going to announce my goal for this week. I've got about 6.5oz of merino/bamboo roving from PortFiber.etsy.com that I bought a long time ago. I want to spin it into a big chunky singles yarn. This is very hard for me, my fingers tend to spin fine, laceweight is not a huge challenge for me, other than the time it takes.

To start with, I've practiced my fat spinning techniques on a few Phat Fiber samples. Some "Popsicle" bamboo (can't remember from who), yellow/pink bamboo from eXtreme Spinning and some milk fiber from Feeling Sheepish.



Here's my little results, 10 yds, 18 wpi, of milk fiber, 13 yds, 22 wpi, of Popsicle bamboo and 24 yds, 22 wpi, of yellow/pink bamboo.

I gave each little skein a soak and pressed the water out by rolling them in a towel and standing on it. A very gentle thwack afterwards and they hung to dry. These little skeins, being singles, were quite twisty when I hung them to dry. I am so impressed with the bamboo! It totally relaxed while drying. The milk fiber did somewhat, but the bamboo skeins no longer twist back on themselves. I heart bamboo! Can't wait to knit something up with these little samples.

2 comments:

Walden said...

The singles look lovely!

Love your education to those who may have been led to your blog on accident.

Julie said...

wow, the singles are gorgeous! the sheen is really evident even from the photos. Looks awesome!