Continuing to spin some older fibres

This is an older fibre from March 2015, although I have only owned it since May 2022 after purchasing it from another spinner who was having a destash, and this another fibre that was from the monthly fibre club that I used to participate in between May 2018 and May 2020, but from its earlier days.

This one is called "Suffragette" and there are two braids, which total 212g together.  The fibre content is 49% Merino, 17% Corriedale, 17% Bluefaced Leicester, 17% Bamboo.

With this one I did a very simple break the braid into two lengths, pre-draft, spin from the end and ply together to create two very straight forward 2ply skeins.

These yarns have spun up as fingering weight and there is 212g/743m of soft, squishy yarn.  It's not my favourite colour, it is a dark green with a kind of dark smokey mauve-grey colour.  It does remind me a lot of another from the same fibre club that I spun a long time ago that was called "Emerald City" and I've included photos of that yarn below and as you can see they are almost identical.  The fibre content on that one was 50% Merino, 25% Bluefaced Leicester, 12.5% Mulberry Silk, 12.5% Bamboo and that also spun up to fingering weight.

Spinning some Faux Cashmere

If I can spin 100% Silk yarns then spinning another braid of Faux Cashmere should be a breeze.  I've tackled a braid before, back in 2022 for the TDF, where I spun that as a 2ply yarn and just pre-drafted and spun from the end and plied. Faux Cashmere is actually 100% Nylon

This time I decided to try something different with my new found confidence in different spinning techniques that I have been trying out in more recent times.

I'm working on spinning my way through some of my older braids of fibre and this one I got from Yummy Yarns UK back in August 2018, 6 years ago!  The colour of this is called Pebble.

What I noticed when I undone the braid is that the dye didn't go all the way through the thickness of the braid in most places.  A lot of it was just on the surface which means that there is way more white fibres than anticipated.  I decided that I would probably be best to pull off small chunks and spin over the fold to try and keep the splodges of colour together in one long single and then to chain ply to keep the colours together even more.  For this to work effectively and give me a decent amount of meterage to knit with I will have to spin as fine as I can.

As you can see from the spinning on the bobbin, this method is working pretty well, producing lengths of different colours/shades.  I like the way this is spinning up, it's really pretty.

I think this has spun up much better than the braid I spun back in 2022.  It has a different feel to it.  The first skein feels "heavy, dense" whilst this one feels light, airy and soft and that has to be to do with spinning it over-the-fold which traps more air between the fibres.  Maybe I should spin over-the-fold more often.  Choosing to chain ply has helped keep the colours together but I think this could have been improved on further had I been more selective and flexible in the lengths of my chain loops to keep like for like colours even more together. This yarn is still gorgeous and is 97g/244m and comes in at a light fingering weight.

Spinning up an old 12 Days of Advent set from 2018

Yesterday I finished spinning a set of 11 silks and a main braid that I started spinning on 16th July for the TDF2024 challenge of spinning something that you find tricky, your arch-nemesis.  This set was from way back to Christmas 2018 and was a set put together to celebrate the 12 Days of Advent (or 12 Days of Christmas if your prefer) by a supplier that I no longer use.  This is not an Advent Calendar, which run 1st to 24th December, this is to celebrate the 12 days after Christmas to 12th Night. There were a few different options available at the time, which I wrote about here, and I chose one called Pine Forest, as those colours appealed to me more than some of the brighter, bolder, or gaudy colour options.

The main braid is really soft and an interesting medium grey colour with splodges of dye along it which match some, but not all, of the colours of the Tussah Silks.  The set is designed to be used together in one project, or at least most of it together in one project, and there are plenty of patterns available that use a main yarn together with smaller amounts of other colours.

So although I spun the first two skeins of silk on 16th and 17th July I didn't spin anything else until 7th August as I was away or busy doing other things.  The Tussah Silk was all spun first, over-the-fold and plied as a standard 2ply yarn.  I used the same over-the-fold method for the main braid too with, again, the standard 2ply.  With hindsight I kind of wish I had spun the main braid as one big single and then chain plied it to keep the colours more together but it's done now and I like it as it is anyway.

The colours of the silks, starting with the pale blue in the 12 o'clock position and working clockwise around are: Sunrise, Fir, Milk, Storm, Twilight, Wood, Cloud, Tuareg, Fog, Thyme, Paradise.  The main braid I have called "Pine Forest", after the name of the entire pack, and the fibre content is 50% Corriedale, 25% Yak, 25% Rose Rayon.  All of the yarns have spun up at 16-18wpi, which is the range for Light Fingering weight.

I am very happy with the way the entire set turned out and I am no longer scared of spinning 100% Silk and I found spinning over-the-fold to be quite enjoyable.