][ Fighting hemp fiber

I left off my last post with a minor moral crisis: what to spin next? 

Ultimately, I decided it was worth the effort to try something a little tougher, so I steeled myself and start spinning the hemp.  It was tough, and not always fun, but I made a deal with myself: if I finished the little puff of roving I'd been playing with ages ago I could stop and try something else. 




 And boy, did I fight.  My resolution to spin fifteen minutes every day became every weekday, then for a time each week equal to fifteen minutes every weekday, then finally, well at least i can work on my knitting.  Aside from the fact that spinning is just hard for me to keep up with, the hemp didn't want to cooperate. 

But it wasn't without its upshots and epiphanies!  Within a couple of days (and some frantic googling, trying to figure out why it was going so badly,) I did start to get a feel for it.  I realized a few important things:

★ Hemp needs a lot of twist-- much more than the wool did-- not to fall apart.  However, once it gets that twist, it stays together really well. 
★ Using my smallest, lightest spindle might have been a mistake.  Actually I think that spindle is just a poor fit for me-- it never seems to spin enough.  I think I might just be more comfortable with ones that have a larger (in diameter) whorl.

★ Though it's harder to control, rolling the spindle off my thigh is a lot more effective-- the hard spin keeps it going longer, where doing it by hand I had to be really careful to catch it before it started spinning the other way.

★ Thin doesn't mean weak-- in fact I suspect the thinner parts of this hank are actually the strongest spots, since the twist is higher.  When I realized this and started just twisting harder when I felt the yarn slipping, instead of trying to even or thicken the fiber, I saw a lot less breakage!

★ Carrying around a bag of this roving allows you to make a lot of inappropriate and hilarious jokes.

That said it takes a lot of attention-- not good T.V.-watching occupation-- so I let it languish a lot.

But then today happened.




I said to myself, you have to get this stupid stuff spun, or else.  So I sat down to do it.  And suddenly-- I don't even know how-- I was on a roll.  Seriously, it went so well, I hope I can replicate that next time I sit down to spin. 

I think the difference was actually doing less pre-drafting of the fiber-- and by rolling off the thigh instead of with my fingers, I was able to keep both hands on the roving to shape and stretch it as needed.  Still not perfect-- keeping it even is so difficult!-- but it went much better, and I swear I blew through the rest of the roving so fast it made my head spin.  Which is good, because I'm sick of looking at it right now. 




Looking at it is kind of funny-- I can see how at the beginning, making it fatter seemed like the only option, but by the end I was being much more daring and stretching it as thin as I could.  Anyway, I wet it down and it's hanging now-- I've read that's less necessary with non-wool fibers, but it seemed like it might help even out the kinks a bit-- and we'll see how it looks when it's dry and done.  Next up is... either more cheap-o wool, or maybe (if i feel brave) some silk hankies. 

The next few posts, though, will probably be about my knitting; I have been working more on that lately. 

][ More spinning stuff

 While I'm not doing a great job of sticking to my "SPIN EVERY SINGLE DAY!" plan, I am definitely being better overall-- so I wanted to share a little of my progress! 

For starters, I took the green wool I was working on, blocked it, and wound it up into a little ball.  I don't have a nostepinne (though it's on my shopping list for this year, assuming I make it to MS&W again,) so I made my own simple ball-winder out of a scrap of tightly-wound wrapping paper.  It's not nearly as satisfyingly pretty but it'll do!





 The ball band is a little scrap of wrapping paper, it happened to be at hand and I think it's cute.  I'm tentatively going to call all my work "Hannah's Hopeless Handspun" because I like alliteration and self-deprecating humor.  Really I think it's going better every time I pick the spindle up, so I can't complain. 

Anyway, of course I did realize after I'd used a bunch of my nice roving that I had some slightly less fancy stuff lying around from Sheep & Wool 2010, so rather than keep making a mess of the gorgeous merino I decided to have some fun with the little bits, figuring I'd feel less awful if I wrecked those.  So I picked up the little purplish 'tail' here, which I think cost me a dollar, maybe two....



And then I split the piece, because my understanding is that with wool dyed this way, that's how you get some repeats of the color changes.  Also it made it much easier to work with!  I think all told I split it into five sections, maybe?  And spun each one in turn, joining it to the end of the last. 




It was a great success!  Though there are still some thin spots and some thick spots, overall it's much more consistent than the other stuff I've been doing and I love how the color came out.  Interestingly there's not much white to it-- even though there was a lot of seemingly undyed roving, the color spread out quite a bit, though it is still quite variegated.  I didn't try too hard to make it a consistent pattern in spite of having split the roving,  I just wanted it to have more color changing than I thought it would if I spun it out as it was.  So it's pretty cool! 

The pictures don't quite capture the color-- there's more red to it in places than my camera really acknowledges-- but I think it's gorgeous.  I just wish I had more, I don't know what I can make with such a darling little skein!






Next up... well, it's a tough call.  I've got the big green coil of wool in the first picture here (cheaper than the nice green stuff from last post,) which I think should produce a reasonably big skein and keep me occupied for a while.  Or I could push myself and try one of the trickier fibers-- I've got two bags of silk hankies I'm a bit nervous about starting with, or a big bag of hemp fiber which I don't mind messing up, but which is really tough to spin, as I remember from  previous attempts.  I'm leaving the nice merino and the gorgeous silk roving in reserve until I feel like I won't totally destroy it. 

I guess we'll see how I feel!