How hard can plying yarn be? Well, it turns out it can be quite complex when one looks at all the options for making yarn from one’s spinning stash.
Our guild members recently had the opportunity to participate in a Plying workshop led by Liz H-K. There was a mix of novice to expert spinners taking part in the two workshops and the consensus was that each of us took away new learning.
Our first step was to make friends with our wheels. Lots of practice was encouraged to make sure we understood just how to adjust the take-up on our specific wheel. After this, we moved on to examining our fibre; pulling out a lock, and figuring out the staple length. One great tip was to make sure the length was just a bit less than the distance between your hands when spinning. This way the fibre separates properly and doesn’t come apart when you try to spin.
We began with spinning thin yarn and plying the two thinly spun examples. We then moved on to spinning a thicker yarn and for some of us, this was a bigger challenge. Isn’t it odd that when we start to spin the thick and thin yarns are the result of our labour at the wheel? Then when we are more experienced and can spin a finer yarn; wet seems to be the only option we have now. It took a bit of muscle memory before the thick spun yarn came off the wheel.
Then we tried our hand at a variety of plying methods. We explored under and over-plied yarn, tried out relaxed rhythmic plying, and then an uneven ply. We learned about making a Flame (slub) yarn using the Jacey Boggs (Ply magazine) and the Sarah Anderson (Ply Magazine) methods. Liz supplied us with sample cards where we can save washed and unwashed samples of the workshop yarns.
Many thanks go to Liz for sharing her knowledge and expertise with us and to our guild president Cherry for organizing and setting up the workshop.
