Trenchwork

I’ve had a nice amount of breathing space this week, and while I still have catching up to do, I’ve been a bit lazy and started clearing up some loose ends.  First, I finished this:

It’s a 50/50 Superwash Merino-Tencel blend from Amy at Spunky Eclectic, hand-dyed in “Aspen.”   I had started it during the spinning demo and needed to get it off the wheel in order to finish the last pound of the grey.  (Sigh.  PLEASE tell me I’ll get finished with that soon!)

There is simply no way to say how much I love this fiber.  Of all the blends I’ve covered and toyed with, I honestly have to say that Tencel blends are my favorite.  They are actually softer than an equal blend of silk, and the shine is simply stunning.  That’s also the reason why this photo doesn’t do the colors justice.  The light bounces off the yarn and between the reflection of snow outside and the half-gloom and flash inside, it’s impossible to get a true shot.  You’ll see the colors better in closeup (click for bigger), but just know that they aren’t half as lovely as they are in real life.  In real life, they’re not washed out, but are warm and rich in a subtle golden cast that really does make one think of the aspens in fall.  Amy has combined a range of tones of gold, green, brown, and a hint of blue, and somehow it all works together beautifully.  Even when the colors barberpole (which I am normally not a fan of), they all seem to go together.  Seriously, I love this fiber.

The Stats.
Fiber:  50/50 Superwash Merino-Tencel blend from Spunky Eclectic, “Aspen”
Weight:  8 ounces
Yardage:  454 yards
WPI/TPI:   14/10

Donna asked me how I manage to get the plies all stacked up together, and I had to stop and think about that for a while.  I prefer a firm rather than loose ply; I lose too much of the twist when I knit, and if the yarn is a loose ply, I find my fabric has the singles in a 2-ply lying side by side rather than contained in a twist, and that’s a problem.  I know I could reverse things and spin Z yarns instead, and I’ve done that just to see what would happen, but when I’m trying to explain spinning to someone new, I don’t want to confuse them.  I don’t want to start them off spinning a yarn which will be in the opposite direction to most contemporary spinning; I’d rather tell them they can do both and then let them make the choice to switch from S to Z later.  So, I spin S.  But I think the answer to Donna’s question is two-fold.  First, I actually slightly overspin my single in order to get the increased twist in my ply.  That’s a balancing act, and there have definitely been times when I found I overspun something a bit too much and ended up with a harder yarn than I wanted.  Second, nearly all my yarns go through an abusive finish.  I am NOT gentle with the stuff; I want to know that what I’m knitting with is going to be the same in raw form as it is in finished form.  And I think those two things are the key for me.  I’ve found that I seem to have about 10 twists to the inch in my ply, and the only exceptions have tended to be longer-stapled and firmer fibers such as that Lincoln I had to gift away, and pure Tencel which isn’t quite as flexible as bamboos and silks.  I’ll have to pay closer attention to my tpi in the singles and the ply in order to get a more precise answer.

And in the spirit of cleaning up (we shall NOT talk about the condition of my office and files), I did this:

I’ve pretty much always kept a binder with notes and a sample of the fiber I was working with, but I’ve outgrown it, and the new one I picked up to replace it simply couldn’t hold things neatly without breaking the binder’s back. Since I’ve decided that the next spinning meeting is going to have a small veiledning session (about 10 minutes’ worth) talking about keeping spinning notes, I realized that I sort of needed to organize my notes into a shape that would actually make sense to someone else. It all made perfect sense to me, but anyone new looking at my notes and slightly chaotic system would have sworn that it was all gibberish. So, I picked up a couple of file boxes from Ikea and transferred things over. They’re fairly small—an A4 sheet of paper folded in half fits with just less than an inch to spare sideways in the box. There are two boxes: one for sheep, and one for everything else.

I need to pick up a few divider cards, but otherwise, things are fairly well organized. Each fiber has a page of notes, a small sample in a floss bag, and a couple yards of indifferently spun and unfinished sample yarn to help give an idea of what the yarn would look and feel like. Each sample and bag is marked with the source of that particular fiber so that I can remember the vendors and fibers I particularly like. If I have a bit of the raw fiber, then that raw fiber goes into a little bag as well so that I can compare it to the commercial or “processed by me” fiber and thus have the entire “chain of evidence,” so to speak.

I’ll have to use a different system for the Master Spinner notebooks, but there’s a lot to be said for these little boxes. And once the divider cards are in place, then won’t I just seem totally organized? (HA!)