Spinning Mama

So I called my roll of ready to spin fiber a "danish" the other day. It's actually more of a "cinnamon bun". Obviously some donut research is needed ;-).

In the meantime, I've unrolled my "pastry", thinned it out some more by gently pulling it thinner (This is really the hardest part of learning to spin I think - drafting - and a video would really be helpful :-/). This drafting is what determines how thick or thin your yarn will be.

I'm sure there are videos on youtube showing how to join the loose roving onto a leader thread (and how to draft ;-) to begin spinning... I may try to do a specific "how to" post at some point, but for now, let's just enjoy looking at how Mama spins up and if you want to know more, just ask :-).



Yarn is basically just twisted fiber. And that can be any fiber. And you can choose any number of methods to add twist. I'm using a spinning wheel to speed things up, but you can use just your fingers and start twisting your wool, flax, cotton, dog hair, musk ox... In the picture above you can see the difference between the loose fiber and the twisted fiber.



Or this might show it better.





Blossom and I spent an enjoyable afternoon spinning up about a half of a bobbin of Mama. She has lovely wool and it was easy to spin.



I then wound the freshly spun yarn (a single ply) into a center pull ball so I could put the two ends together to ply (sort of re-spinning) them into a two ply yarn. You can see how the yarn naturally wants to do that on it's own.



Again, the wheel speeds things up and I end up with a bobbin full of two ply.

I completely forgot to take any pictures of the yarn being unwound from the bobbin onto a niddy noddy (a hand tool to make a skein) so you'll just have to imagine that part. Sigh.



Blossom, modeling the skein of Mama's yarn.



Pretty yarn even with it's spinning inconsistencies due to too much "Aw, look how cute Blossom is napping/sitting there/sniffing the yarn/checking out the wheel/chasing the chickens/mugging me for Cheerios... Wait! I should take a picture/video of that!"


iPhone



Today we spent a nice afternoon together knitting up a fun sample. Actually I knit while Blossom napped ;-). There are some cute pictures of her on my Twitter feed.

I hope you've enjoyed "meeting Mama" as much as I did. I'll be spinning the rest of Mama to send back to Miss C and she's got a fun project in mind. Stay tuned!