Reconstruction

Mom and I have been very careful.  Groceries are picked up after someone else has done the shopping (Instacart employee), no gatherings of any kind are attended and if family stops by we sit outside physically distancing.  So there have been no runs to the LYS although some of us might argue yarn is essential.  Nor is there a need for more yarn or roving on my part, there is in my stash more than a lifetime supply.  And of course I still have about 1.5 sheep´s worth of fleece to spin anyway.  Having said that I needed a break from the sea of white that I´ve been working on for the last several weeks.  So I picked something with bold colors to distract me for a short time.

I did bring with me a lovely merino wool that I had spun very early in my spinning career.  I know it is merino by the feel of it and its shorter staple even though the label that would give details is missing.  It was the colors that attracted me to it.  The ball of yarn I made is pictured below and as you see the spinning went very, very poorly.  

Love, love, love this colorway

There are thin and thick stretches throughout the ball because it is both over and under spun in places.  In short it is a hot mess but for some reason it was not thrown out.  I could say I don´t know why, but I do, I´m thrifty.   Most roving runs about $15-20 per 50 grams and I did and do love the colors so this small ball has moved with me to Minneapolis and now to Mom´s.

As I looked and worked with it more closely I recognized the problem.  There were three colored strands put together in this roving, a pink/maroon color, an orange and a deep purple.  The purple strand seems to have been slightly felted in the dye process and thus made spinning with it in the mix a challenge.  Had I done a good predraft before the first spin I might have generated better yarn, but I didn´t or may not have even known that one should predraft.  So yesterday I deconstructed the yarn using the hand carder.  In this application it worked to not only loosened the strands of wool but also like a blending board mixing the colors even more. 

It was tedious as every few inches of yarn had to be unspun by hand so that it could be stretched over the card, put into a new rolag and spun again.  

Hereś a shot taken midway through the reconstruction.  The new yarn is on the bobbin and the old wedged under it.  It is quite the transformation and reminds me some spinning skills have been developed since the first ball was created.  Not only can I spin or reconstruct a finer yarn, I can deconstruct a poorly spun yarn and make something usable.

The transformation yielded 15 yards of sport weight yarn.  Even though it isn´t much I am proud that I could give it a new and improved life.  Now I fade back to spinning white!