#cheingora — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #cheingora, aggregated by home.social.
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So close to the end!
I've finally finished off the last of ball 8.a on the Husky Spinning Story Scarf. To add just a little more length, I'm frogging the hotpad swatch (also 8.a) directly onto the end of the scarf.
While the patterns look similar, the hotpad has a wider seed border, so I can't just splice the two together. Full frog and re-knit it is!
Already starting to think about new projects to follow up this one...
[Oops! Forgot alt text. Sorry for any edit notices!]
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The spinner in action! Most of the time it was nice and hypnotically rhythmic like this.
Not shown: the annoying times when one of the strands would break and I'd have to pause to splice it back in. At least being triple-ply means overall the resulting yarn should hold together!
The spiky thing holding my singles is a Lazy Kate, Also by Dreaming Robots (the makers of the EEW series of spinning tools). Well worth the incredibly modest investment!
https://www.dreamingrobots.com/lazykate/
Audio: commentators from the Giro d'Italia, which we're trying to catch up on!
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The solution? Get a bigger spinning wheel, of course!
I knew that the EEW 6.1 was coming out in May (and the previous model was sold out), and had 6 oz bobbins (perfect!), so I bid my time until they were in stock. It was still several weeks before I could try it out, but now I'm spinning away!
I'm VERY happy with the EEW 6.1. The Nano 2 was fine for learning, but it was finicky to get the tension right on, and for dealing with thicker yarns. The 6.1 is much easier to deal with, and has a great foot-activated switch too!
After a quick test spinning single ply to get a feel for things, I was ready to tackle my first triple ply. Results are maybe a little uneven in spin (my fault, not the spinner), but I hope it evens out in follow-up processing. So far I'm quite pleased!
[Edit: adding alt text]
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Has it really been almost 4 months since our last husky yarn update‽ Much of that time has been quiet, but things are starting to spin up again, as it were!
In that time I've completed spinning all of Rio's heather gray fur onto a baseball (softball?) sized winding around the Turkish spindle. It's so pretty and precious I still haven't done anything more with it.
I've also completed e-spinning one 2-oz bobbin of yarn from each of the three tubs of fur, representing 5 separate huskies we've had over the years.
My goal has been to ply all three bobbins together to create a triple-ply yarn of all our huskies in one. But herein lies a problem! Each bobbin holds 2 oz of yarn: how to ply all 3 together without breaking it into 3 more separate strands? I want to keep the yarn as continuous as possible...
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For those who like spinning minutiae, an update on the various plied yarns in the previous post to this thread:
I've since washed and set the yarn, which gave a chance to appreciate the minor variations in the different plying styles and yarn thicknesses while wound on the frame/niddy-noddy. I then wound them up again into balls, with a little more care for neatness this time.
The differences are subtle at a distance. I like them both! Next: to decide what to do with them.
[Yikes, sorry for any edit notices, but one typo was just too egregious to leave.]
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🧵 Continuing the husky yarn thread!
I've broken into the rest of our ~20yr collection of husky fur, which fills the three tubs seen here. My plan is to combine yarn for each so that we end up with a 3-ply yarn from each of the huskies we've had over the years. Most will be done on the Nano e-spinner.
But! I'd forgotten that one of our huskies had a grayish undercoat in places, and found it compressed at the bottom of the oldest bag of fur.
I could have just blended it in, but instead I kept it separate to create a distinctly gray yarn. It is special and limited (that's all of it combed into punis in the 3rd photo), so I'm hand spinning it on the Turkish spindle. It's turning into a wonderful heather gray yarn that will be a great accent next to the white!
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🐺 🧶 🔀 🧵 Time to continue the husky yarn spinning thread!
Previously, I'd practiced spinning & plying on my Turkish spindle. Now it's time to practice plying with the new EEW Nano e-spinner.
This is my first practice spool on the Nano, which I'd washed & set, then wound into a center pull ball. That allows you to 2-ply from a single ball, drawing from the inside & outside at the same time.
The bottom shows the 2-ply on the left side. Because my yarn was pretty uneven, you often get areas of loose fluff wound with a tight thin strand. I thought the 1st try was rather loose (3rd 📷) so I sent it through the spinner a 2nd time to add more twist (4th 📷), which I believe helped.
The right side is Navajo 3-ply, a neat technique I wanted to try using one end of a single strand. You create a series of loops (basic crochet chain, but LONG loops) that twist into a 3-strand yarn. It tends to be more even b/c you're plying the same stretch of yarn against itself.
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Perhaps most surprisingly, I've continued to spin on the Turkish spindle and have come to find it a more relaxing, meditative process than the urgency of keeping up with the e-spinner. It's much easier now to get consistent, even thickness and spin, and it just looks so pretty wound neatly around the spindle.
This completes the fur I've prepared so far. I can't bear to unwind this spindle just yet! Time to switch back to the e-spinner for my next project.
...which involves digging out fur we've collected from previous, sadly-departed huskies and making yarn from them. My goal is to ply together all our huskies into a single yarn to knit scarves or hats or something.
More on that when this 🧵 thread resumes!