She Was Twisted

I’ve been a very bad blogger and I haven’t updated in a long, long time. I blame it on the holidays. It’s been busy, busy for the past 3 weeks, as I am sure it is for everyone this time of year.

But….now we can get back to the grind. Spinning and knitting! Yay!

So let’s start with my new obsession. FINE spinning.

I usually get frustrated with spinning fine because it takes forever and I usually end up fighting with the fiber and throwing it across the room. Well, I decided to give it another go. And it was great!

So here is the roving. It is Faux Cashmere roving (nylon) that I dyed with Lanaset Dyes in the microwave. Purtee. I’m going to call this fiber Faux Silk from now on. To me, it is not like cashmere at all, but everything like silk. Sue me.

I started by dividing it up into super, super thin strips so I wouldn’t have much drafting to do. I figured that would be a good way to get my hands into the groove. Since the fibers are so fine and long, I found that you have to keep your hands firm on the fiber and never, NEVER let the twist come anywhere near the drafting triangle. (Just like when spinning silk.) If it does, the whole thing will get choked up and it won’t draft at all.

LOOK! Oh my, it’s so fine! Weeeee.

The more I spun, the more confident I got, and was able to start spinning thicker pieces of roving. Still split pretty thin, I’d say like finger width. And much to my utter surprise, I LIKED IT.

So here is my bobbin filling up with singles….

And here it is plied on the bobbin. Doesn’t all the color mixing look nice? I just love how rainbow or handpainted rovings spin up. You never get bored with the color variations.

And the final product. (This pic was taken in natural light, so it is a better representation of the true colors.) I ended up with a fine, sock-weight 2-ply yarn. Yippie! I’m so proud of myself! Since then, I’ve spun one more Faux cashmere and 2 Merino yarns. The Merino did not come out as thin because it likes to pop out of itself when plied and the twist is set. Sneaky.

I’ve got another Merino ready to spin that I will start tonight most likely. It does take a long time to spin fine and 2-ply, but the results are worth it!

Yes, fake cashmere. I couldn’t resist buying some of this stuff. It is synthetic, made from rayon I believe, and is advertised as being as soft as cashmere. Machine washable and long fiber length is a bonus. Humm. Sounds fun, right?

Dyeing
Dyeing the fiber was a lot of fun. It soaked up the dyes beautifully. I used Lanaset acid dyes in pink, mauve, fushia and tan. I dyed the fiber in the crock pot, just randomly pouring color over the layers of coiled up fiber. The dye bonded just like an animal fiber. I didn’t have any color wash out in the final rinse. So that was a good thing.

But spinning it was a bit tricky.

Spinning
The fiber is so fine and has such a long staple length, that even just pulling the fiber apart was a challenge. It is STRONG. My first attempt was to spin a single-ply, bulky yarn. No, no, no. I got extremely frustrated. Drafting was a nightmare because if the teeny-tiniest bit of twist got anywhere near the fiber supply, the whole thing would harden up and not budge. After fighting with the roving for a half hour or so, I gave up. – Not worth my time.

So instead, I opted to treat the fake cashmere just like silk. – I split it down to tiny little strips about the width of my pinky, and I spun long woolen-ish style, never allowing the twist to ever come in between my front hand and the back hand holding the fiber. Now we are spinning! The biggest challenge was to keep the twist away from the drafting triangle. I plied it and ended up with some really nice worsted weight yarn.

Now is it as soft as cashmere?

IMO, not really.

The Yarn
In my opinion, it is identical to silk. It feels like silk, it spins like silk, it has the same strength as silk and it knits like silk. I really think they should call it fake silk. And if anyone thinks I’m out of my mind to say this, please! let me know. I’d love to hear what other folks think of this stuff.

I do love the slight sheen, the softness and the “crisp” in the final yarn. However there is very little stretch (what is that called – elasticity?) so you wouldn’t want to make anything that is going to require a lot of stretch and memory.

Oh wait – but I am one for doing exactly what you shouldn’t do…so I decided to knit a pair of wrist warmers.

The Knitting
I looked through my handy-dandy book, The New Knitting Stitch Library, and found a simple cable-looking pattern that isn’t really a cable. (The cross-over is actually formed by knitting behind 3 stitches.) Then I knit up a swatch on size 7 needles, calculated my stitches per inch, measured my wittle wrists and found me a cast-on number. Last some fiddling here and there and figured where to place my cable.

The cable was a pain in the butt to knit with the fake cashmere. Remember my saying that there was little to no elasticity and memory? Well try knitting in the back loop of a stitch that is 4 stitches over on your needles. You have to stretch across without dropping all the stitches that are being skipped. I found it very difficult. I would imagine had I been working with a nice stretchy wool yarn, it wouldn’t have been such an ordeal.

To add some frills and thrills, I added a ruffle border that I found in the book, Knitting Over The Edge. Again, this was not fun at all to knit with a non-stretchy yarn since you are knitting like 3-4 times in the same stitch over and over again. But the ruffles are so cool. I love them.

End Result
I do like the faux cashmere a lot. It created a strong, super-soft yarn that I can dye with my regular acid dyes, and can throw in the washing machine when I please. However, I did learn to treat it like silk in both spinning and knitting. Plan projects accordingly. My wrist warmers are warm, snuggly and soft. Now I need to start all over again and see how much more I can learn with my next project!