Trenchwork

Warning: Ugly content ahead.

Ending up with those leftover singles prompted me to take out a bit of the black and white Brown Sheep roving from The Sheep Shed Studio (see photo in this post) and make another attempt at figuring out how to Navajo or chain ply. It took a while to get accustomed to the grabby nature of a normal wool (versus the slippery feel of the silk blend), but since I wasn’t aiming for beauty, I wasn’t particularly concerned about consistency. The single eventually did become more consistent so that I was spinning a fingering-weight single, but I’d thought that the black-white would help me see how the twist was working better than a plain roving.

Actually, it did. I stripped the roving lengthwise so that I had segments with both black and white, then did a wee bit of predrafting to loosen up the wool (it’s been crammed in a box since it arrived), and went for it. I gave myself a couple of ounces to work with, then switched to an empty bobbin, tied a loop in the single around the leader on the bobbin, and took the plunge. It took a while, but I think I finally figured out how it’s supposed to work, and I’m not feeling quite the idiot I thought I was. I found a loop size that worked for me—about 12 inches—and realized that if I held back the twist at the last “knot,” I could anchor the top part of the chain so that I had three strands evenly tensioned and side by side. Slip up the hand holding back the twist to the point where the other had anchored the loop, pull up a new loop, and repeat. I’ve no idea if that’s the way it’s really supposed to work, and the only videos I’ve seen of the process don’t show it clearly enough to see how the strands are held together. But it worked.

The only reason I’m showing this is because of the color. This is fresh off the plying bobbin and while the yarn was actually very balanced, there are none of the positive effects which normally come from setting the twist. The yarn is uneven, and only toward the end of the bobbin did I finally get into a kind of a rhythm so that I was getting a more even ply (which is naturally offset by the inconsistencies of the single), but I learned something about color. Specifically, when I span the single, I expected—and got—a barber-pole effect. I used it to measure twist since I thought part of my problem in my first test had been that I’d overspun the single, expecting that it would need the same amount of twist as a plain 3-ply. Apparently, it doesn’t. It just needs the normal amount of twist you’d use for a 2-ply. It seems. But, when you combine three barber-pole singles, what you get is this rather interesting salt-and-pepper three-ply.

The fiber is interesting as well, and has a rather nice feel to it for plain wool. It seems to like being made into a rather lofty yarn; it feels hard when it’s spun thin. I could imagine doing this into a thick-thin or plushy, heavy worsted-weight, and suspect that’s where the rest of it is headed. In the meantime, however, I’m counting this particularly ugly yarn as a success: it helped me figure out Navajo plying. By the time I finish spinning and plying the rest of the pound of fiber, I should have a fairly solid handle on things. Maybe.