A Tale of Two Skeins

If you've been following this blog for a while, you may have noticed an increase in the number of post on spinning since the beginning of 2010. I swear it wasn't my New Year's resolution to actually use my spinning wheel, I just caught the spinning bug. And as I learn new and interesting things about making my own yarn, I like to share them here in the hope that you learn something as well. We're all about learning at Casa BrineyDeep.


Today's spinning post deals with how I processed the above roving, which was dyed by one of my Ravelry friends, Pacasha (you can find her hand-dyed rovings and skeins here). This is a superwash merino in blue and brown, in a colorway called McGonagall. Seeing as this is a simple two-color roving, I set out to see if I could get some variability in the final yarn based upon how I spun it up.


I spun two skeins out of this roving; the one on the left is a two-ply spun on my wheel and the one on the right is a Navajo-ply spun on a spindle. You can see the difference in their structure in this close-up picture, but I find their color difference to be even more interesting.


The Navajo-plied yarn on the left has more concentrated sections of color, due to the plying method. I also think that spinning slightly thicker singles for the two-ply on the right at makes the colors wash out a bit. The real test, of course, it to actually knit up swatches in each these yarns.


The color intensity observed in the third photo really carries over into the swatch, but now we start to see pooling in the Navajo-ply swatch (lower swatch) that does not occur in the two-ply swatch (upper swatch). While there is some variability in the two ply, it is much more subtle. I really like the fabric created by each of these yarns, but for very different reasons.

Eventually I hope to use both of these skeins in a single project, somehow showing off both their differences and their similarities. I think that that may be easier said than done.