Well that was a challenging four days! Britspin started at 9pm UK time on Wednesday 14 October, and finished at 9pm UK time on Sunday 18. I decided to spin a multi-colored braid from deep stash (2016….), with no real plan what I am going to do with it once I have it spun up! Most of my knitting isn’t really suited for multi-colored wool, other than socks of course, and I really am not keen yet on spinning for socks.
This is a braid of 15-micron merino from Woolgatherings; gorgeous colors, but a lot of variation in there! My original plan was to just spin straight through, but that changed a bit as I spun.
Wednesday night was interesting to say the least. My Symphony wheel has been sitting in the corner of the living room collecting dust for at least four years, the poor thing, although interestingly I don’t think the cats ever tried to use it as a climbing frame. So the first order of business was to dust it, put it back together (I’d taken the flyer off and wrapped the drive band around so that the cats wouldn’t hang themselves), and oil it everywhere. I sat down and started spinning, only for it to squeak every time I treadled. More oil, but no improvement. Since I’m in France, not the UK, I only sat down to start spinning at 10pm my time – not ideal! I think I finally packed it in around 11, with not much done. I’m torn off a blob of wool from one end of the braid and just started spinning my default fine singles.
Thursday I had no motivation, so maybe put in half an hour? Something about a squeaking wheel and a book I wanted to finish just sapped me of much energy.
Friday, I did some spinning, but not much. The good news, however, is that the squeak essentially went away! I untied the laces holding the footmen to the treadles, ran them over a candle to wax them, retied them tighter than they had been before, and oiled everywhere else. I sat down to spin, and after about fifteen minutes realized that the only noise I could hear was the whirr of the flyer and bobbin and drive band. No squeak!
Saturday I think I sat down at the wheel at about 1, and except for short breaks to stretch or change position I pretty much spun until about 6. Sunday, I started at 10 and finally quit and wound off my yarn to measure at just after 6. Thank heavens for long audiobooks.
As I said earlier, my initial plan was to just spin straight through the braid, and that’s largely what I’m doing. But, as I pulled off short bits from the braid, I would sometimes get the start of one color on the end of the next, and while there will be some color blending I didn’t want a lot of barber-poling either in the singles or the plied yarn. I was also having a bit of frustration managing to spin from the entire width of top without having it end up in a wad.
The solution – pull off a blob of top, split it lengthwise into generally about five or so thinner pieces, and then pull off any of the next color that had come along for the ride. So, if I had purple shading into turquoise, I would try to get as much of the turquoise off as I could, spin all the purple, then start spinning the turquoise. It made it much easier both to handle the unspun fiber, to keep it from bunching up as I spun off of it, and to manage the color in a way that made me happy. You can see in the montage below how the colors progressed as I spun.
At the end of my spinning on Sunday, I wound the single off the bobbin around a book. I plan to put it back on a bobbin and spin the rest of the braid, or at least as much as I can get onto that bobbin, before chain-plying the whole mess. I counted the wraps as I wound, and based on the circumference of the book I ended up with just over 317 meters spun from 18 grams of top. Not bad for a novice!
Some of the singles is awfully thin, some is thicker than I’d like it to be, but I think once I have it plied up it’ll make about a fingering weight, although it might be a heavy laceweight, we’ll see.
And as far as how I’ll use it – I’ve made arrangements to borrow a rigid heddle loom over the holidays to see if I enjoy weaving, before I splash out money on a loom of my own. If I have this all spun up by then, I’m thinking I might eventually use it as the weft in a scarf of some sort. That would certainly be easier than trying to knit with such a variety of colors!
There's a cat hair in my knitting! 