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One of These Three

Last week our spinning instructor gave each of us a 2 ounce/57 grams of corriedale (another breed of sheep) roving.  Mine was red and black with the colours running the length of the roving.  Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of it before I started to spin.  The picture below is reasonably close to what I was working with from the start only my colours were different.  You can see blocks of brown, tan and blue in this sample.  My blocks of colour were red, black and then a red/black combo.

Photo from WoolieBullie

The instructor asked us to take it home and spin it up separating the roving in a few different ways to experiment to see the results.  There are choices to make:  1) running the variegated roving straight through the spinning wheel which will keep the colourway generally as they are found in the roving, or 2) manipulating the roving to see what comes of it. (More about all the decisions one most make about colour in spinning in the future as I learn more.)

I chose to split my red/black roving into three separate colors: red, red/black mix and black.  This gave me three single bobbins that I used to make a three-ply yarn.   But the split wasn't even so I had extra red and red/black so the two were used to create a two-ply yarn.  Then when the red/black ran out I plied the rest of the red together.  When I plied the two strands of red together something went wrong, really wrong.

In the photo below, you will be able to pick out that one of these three does not look like the others.  Here might be a good time to state that with all the bragging I did in my last post about the polwarth/silk yarn you might be lead to believe everything is coming up sunshine and rainbows with my spinning.  The photo below shows that is not the case.

The one on the right is the problem child

The three-ply looking pretty good

The two-ply looking good as well

Mr. Squiggly, not like the others
So I took my poor mangled red roving to class, passed it around and asked what I had done and what, if anything could be done to fix it.  The answer was simple.  If you spin roving in a clockwise motion, you'd better ply it with the wheel moving in a counter-clockwise motion.  Should you spin it again in a clockwise motion all the twist put in it the first time around is basically taken out during the second spin.  I was told to take it through the wheel slowly going counter-clockwise and it should be fixed.

Well here it is after having done just that and taking a dip in water to set the ply.  Perfect, not exactly, but definitely improved.  I don't think roving likes to be spun, unspun and then spun again.  But the next time I encounter such a squiggly mess I'll know what I did.  Lesson learned





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