In which I drone on about my somewhat arcane hobby you probably don't care about

Between R. having another rough day and the verdict on the impeachment, I feel totally dispirited. But different reasons, but it just didn't feel like an uplifting day. Since I had no margin to do much of anything and because J. had R. outside for a while while he was snow blowing the drive, I retreated to my studio for a bit. Because I find working at the spinning wheel to be profoundly soothing, that is what I'm going to write about. Perhaps you need to feel a little bit soothed as well. 

My goal for the past couple of weeks had been to really get comfortable using my new wheel. (Well, new to me, my new wheel is actually older than my old wheel.) It felt like a steep learning curve at first. In general it is a much easier to wheel to use and doesn't fight you quite like my other one. It is easier, that is, once you get everything set correctly. There are several different ways to adjust it and that was what took some figuring out. My old wheel has very few ways to adjust how it works, so getting going is easier, but it also means you are limited in what you can do. 

So, over the past weeks, I have been playing around with it, figuring out what to do with each of the knobs and things. Once I did figure it out, it was so much easier to spin on than my other wheel. I was pretty amazed at how fine a yarn I could spin on it with very little effort. From all of this playing around, I had two bobbins with two different yarns on them. One was my initial trial, using some wool roving that I have pounds of and will probably never us up. I now use it for experiments because I won't be broken hearted to throw out a poor attempt. The other was a sampling of some beautiful grey merino wool roving that I bought on sale a while back. I hadn't done anything with it because I know it can be tricky to spin merino on my old wheel. I can do it, it's just not quite as relaxing. Having figured out my new wheel, I decided to try. It spun up beautifully. 

This brings us up to today and wanting to do something with the yarn on those two bobbins. I knew I wanted to try plying on my new wheel and I wanted to sample what my grey yarn would look like plied. My problem was that I didn't want to ply the two yarns together, but only had one bobbin of each. (Plying is spinning two or more single strands of yarn together into a thicker yarn.) The easiest way is to have two bobbins and pull from both as you ply. I didn't have two bobbins of each. 

On one of my long days on the couch with R. last week, I came across the idea of Andean plying. You essentially wind you yarn onto your hand with the end result being you have the two ends coming off of it and you can ply from the yarn bracelet on your hand. It seemed like a cool thing to learn. It also seemed like something that was trickier than it looked. So I decided to use my sacrifice yarn as my first attempt. I did it... sort of... but learned several things. You can't wrap the yarn on your hand too tightly or it is difficult to get it off. It also took some figuring out how to control the yarn as it twisted and fed onto the bobbin. Here is my not so fantastic first effort.

This is not really wonderful. Actually, it's just not good. You can't see the individual strands of yarn since it is so over twisted. It is so over twisted that it is difficult to pull them apart from each other. It's a mess and I'll be throwing it away. 

Having figured out what went wrong, I tried it again with the merino. This went much, much more smoothly. This actually looks like yarn.

I'm pretty happy with this. The size of this yarn plied is actually thinner than I can usually ply singles on my other wheel. This means that I will probably try spinning some more of it and seeing what a 3-ply looks like out of it. I never thought I'd be able to spin fine enough singles to even consider making a 3-ply. See how thin they are.

And since it is merino wool, the yarn is super soft. I'm just kind of giddy about the whole thing. It's good I'm happy with it because I have a bit more wool to spin.

As you can see, this is about 2 pounds of wool. The sample I finished today used a fraction of an ounce of wool to make. That's a lot of yarn (and hours spinning) represented in that bag.