This will eventually become a habit, lately it took me more or less a year to finish my spinning WIPs! Of course, I have good reasons, like publishing patterns, but still!
This one is a long overdue spinning project. In April 2014, I gifted a Malabrigo Nube braid to Fanny for her birthday. The braid itself was no use for her as she’s not a spinner. But the braid came with a promise: I’ll spin it in whatever way she wants.
It took a while to decide exactly how the braid will be spun as I needed practice and she needed to see examples in order to get a general idea of what it may look like once finished in the different possible ways.
The fibre
I purchased the fibre at L’Aiguille en Fête back in 2014, when Lil Weasel started stocking it. I may or may not have purchased 4 braids that day… What can I say, I’m so weak when it comes to handdyed fibres. She loves green so I got her the Solis colourway which goes from gorgeous deep turquoises to beautiful lawn green. I love it! And I knew she would too.
With its 113g, Malabrigo Nube is a generous 100% Merino wool fibre. The first batches had some felting issues but it has been resolved since then and this one only had two small difficult spots even if it was an early braid.
Preparing and Spinning the Fibre
After a lot of discussion with Fanny about the fibre and what she wants to knit with the spun yarn, it turned out that she really liked my Poppy Bouquet one and how it knitted up into my Fleurs Sauvages cowl. So I aimed for something similar which is a 2-ply fingering without too much barber-poling. First, I split the braid in half to get the same amount of fibre in each ply. Then, I created faux-lags using my blending board in order to mix up the colours and spun from them in a random way, choosing the one I wanted one at a time.
I used the exact same technique as for the Poppy Bouquet for the actual spinning, which is a short forward draw. It gives an extra lustre to the yarn and a denser feel.
I still have troubles with my twist. I’m having a hard time finding the right amount of twist in my singles which leads to difficulties finding the right amount of ply twist as well. I definitively need more practice, in particular because I want to spin more single yarns where’s no ply to even out my mistakes.
The Mermaid Tail Handspun yarn
Despite those flaws, I’m really happy with the result and I hope she will too! I was able to create two skeins:
– Little Mermaid weights 52 grams for 362 meters
– Big Mermaid weights 69 grams for 450 meters
All in one, it sums up to 121 grams and 812 meters. Approximately 670 meters for 100g which class it as a light fingering weight yarn. Nailed it!
I’m always keen to learn new techniques (I’m totally addicted to Craftsy and CreativeLive, I can spend my whole day watching videos on those two). Do you have spinning books, blogs, magazines to refer to me?
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