If you don’t have a swift or a nostepinne (or don’t want to go upstairs then get them), the back of a chair and a roll of paper work fine to take yarn from skein to ball form.
I rolled up two skeins of hand spun cotton this way. This is the cotton that I spun from raw bolls then three plied two ways: crepe and chain ply.
I’m most interested in how these two preparations knit up. Yes, I’m looking forward to swatching. I’m weird like that.
Since I had more spun cotton single than I needed for my crepe yarn, I tried chain plying it to make a three ply yarn sample. It did not go well. The cotton single was difficult to handle and kept breaking if the strands rubbed together. The resulting yarn is very haphazard with sections that coiled mixed in with the smooth ply.
The chain ply and the crepe yarn don’t look that different on casual observation because of the irregularity of the single spin. The variations in width cause more visual texture than the plying techniques. I will have to try this comparison with a different fiber preparation.
I found out about crepe yarn, which is a three ply yarn with a different construction. A single is spun in the S direction, then two plied in the Z direction. Then another single is spun with a Z twist, the plied with the two ply in an S direction. The resulting yarn has an interesting texture. I decided to try this method with the natural cotton I am spinning on the Ashford Traveller wheel.
I grossly misjudged the amount of Z twist single and ended up with way more than I needed to ply the three ply. Sigh.
It will be interesting to see how the yarn knits up. It does have more texture than a standard three ply, but because my cotton was spun from raw bolls that had not been carded, the yarn already had a variations in the spin.
I’m enjoying spinning my cotton bolls. It is a meditative process, from picking the seeds out of the fiber to spinning it up. I have the time and no deadlines so I can enjoy the process. I absolutely see why cotton gins were invented, because seed picking bales of cotton by hand would be an arduous task.
For grins, I laid out a cotton seed head, then another with the bolls removed, then another with the seeds removed.
I also did a video showing how I remove the boll and seeds, then spin the fiber. I have not been carding the fiber, but experimenting with the pulled fluff.
This is one of my favorite crochet textures. I’ve heard it called many names, but orange or lemon peel is what sticks in my head. It is an alternating pattern of single and double crochet stitches across, the on row two the single crochets go in the previous double crochet, and the double crochets go in the previous row’s single crochet. It takes a little time to recognize which stitch is which, but the finished project is very forgiving.
Critters and Craft 