An Estonian girl who has found a home in Sweden.

Friday, April 10

Processing Locks for Spinning Experiments

April 10, 2015 Posted by Vaire ,

When you buy spinning fibre from indie sellers, they sometimes put some little surprises into the packages. I bought a braid of Teeswater top and these Romney locks were a very nice surprise that she had included.

Romney locks

They are absolutely gorgeous and I've been hesitant to spin them in fear of messing it up. It's only is 30g I've got, after all. But then I thought that even if the yarn is not the finest or the most consistent, I still should try it. So I did.

Romney Locks

I begun by flicking the locks and trying to spin from the tip of the lock, but that didn't work very well. It was probably just my inexperience, but in the end it was just too frustrating to try to draft from such long fibre. I tried to flick more locks at a time and have more fibre to draft from, tried to make some sort of top-like thingy, nothing worked until I decided to spin from the fold.

That worked just fine. I'm still struggling with even joins, but spinning one lock at a time from the fold is the perfect way to practise joining. This single will, sadly, be uneven in the beginning, but such is the price of experimentation. It'll even out in the plying and finishing later.

Romney Locks

Then I had to decide what to do with all the short fibres that I combed out of the locks with the flicker. I decided to card them and see if I could make nice fluffy rolags and how it would work to spin from those. That worked even better than spinning from the fold. I have a nice little spindle collection by now, so I just grabbed another spindle.

Both singles will be plyed to themselves because I'm quite sure the yardages won't match and I want to see the difference in the yarns between the from the fold draft and short forward draft from the rolags.