Spinning Tuesdays: Adventures In Spinning Worsted

One of my spinning goals for this year is to make friends with worsted style spinning.

The only way for me to do that is to spin a lot of worsted yarn this year, to make myself spin that way, like waking up with an alarm.

 

I spun 4 ounces of Spunky Eclectic, South African Fine in the Peace on Earth colorway.

2 bobbins both with 2 ounces of yarn on them, why is one fuller?

Both bobbins have 2 ounces of fiber on them. Why is one so much fuller? Did I cheat and spin the fluffy fiber woolen?

No, I did not cheat, really, I have the hand cramp to prove it. Both bobbins were spun worsted, no twist between my hands and smoothing, smoothing, smoothing. I do like the smoothing part of worsted. The bobbin in the front has more twist in it. I changed my ratio after the first bobbin to see what difference it would make.

I spun on my Lendrum DT, with the regular flyer. The first fluffier bobbin I spun on the biggest whorl/pulley/thingamabobber which has a ratio of 6:1. The second bobbin, I dropped down one groove to a ratio of 8:1.

 

Now I won't say that having more twist made my worsted spinning effortless, but it sure helped. It was easier to draft and control using the worsted style. I got a more compact and finer yarn. I still said a lot of words not fit for a blog post.  I had my fiber in a death grip. My yarn was uneven, and uneven in a way that wouldn't have bothered me if I was spinning woolen, but made me crazy in the worsted yarn. Learning something new is hard.

I did a simple two-ply:

I love this colorway

I like the yarn. I can see the usefulness of worsted spinning. That's as much love as I have today for the worsted. I still have a hand cramp. But I'm going to do it again, this time with a smoother less fluffy fiber, maybe something with shine.

 

When I first opened this club package I knew I wanted to make a shawl out of it. So I swatched with my new worsted yarn:

A little blue lace

I really like the stitch pattern in this yarn, but I want to try going up a needle size, just to see. I'm thinking about a crescent style shawl. What do you think?

 

My first appearance as jabbering sidekick on the SpinDoctor podcast is available to download. If you think I get excited about spinning here, you should hear me talk about it. Downright giddy.