Overplied!
On Sunday afternoon, I finally felt well enough to sit by the wheel, so I plied up the two bobbins of pretty blue fluff. Indeed, the bobbins hold about 4 oz. of fiber, as you can see from this crammed bobbin!
I then wound the yarn onto my makeshift niddy-noddy, also known as two posts and one beam from my sweater dryer. It bent a bit, but made an excellent substitution for the tool.
That's 119 yards or so.
I had read on the internet (while I was sick and couldn't spin) that it can be OK to overply the yarn, that overplying gets corrected with hot water and whacking. So I decided to go for the overplied side of things. Apparently, though, I took that little tidbit too far! When I removed the yarn, it went sproing! into a mess of coils and overplied yarny goodness.
A soak in the tub, followed by a few very fun whacks against the side of the shower, seemed to remove most of the little coils.
As you can see, it's still quite overplied. I must have been a bit ply-happy when I was at the wheel. I didn't use the plying head, but just a regular bobbin, and the same whorl I'd used to spin the yarn, which made plying go so much more easily. (Until the flyer started sqeaking and I had to clean it, but that's another story). We'll have to work on the plying! In this picture, the yarn is still pretty wet, so I can't give you the pretty all-skeined-up shot quite yet.
I can't decide whether I like it like the overplied look or not. I really like the blue-lagoon colors of this yarn, and I'd like to make a hat or something out of it. It could make a really funky hat as is, or a really nice and lofty hat if it weren't plied so darn much. I'm half of a mind to reply it once it's dry, to get something that looks a little less squished. How, exactly, does one go about replying something?
5 comments:
The color is gorgeous. I think plying is more fun than spinning, and I have to watch myself or I overply, too.
That's very pretty - such a great job for one of your first new skeins! I wouldn't try re-plying, although I suppose you could stick it back in the bottom and run it clock-wise to loosen the ply a bit if you really want to.
You can take some of the ply out by putting the yarn back on the bobbin (you could wind it into a center pull ball, and then feed it back onto the bobbin with the least wheel tension possible, since essentially you are adding even more twist by putting it back on the bobbin). Then you put a new bobbin on the wheel, use a lazy kate or some such for the overplied yarn, and run it back through the wheel in the opposite direction that you plied it to take out some of the twist. You want to do this again on very low tension because you don't want to end up with underplied yarn! The yarn will, at that point, look like crap. So you go through the skeining - washing - drying process again, and it should come out okay. I've had it work out just fine. The good news is that once you've had to take twist out of yarn, you'll probably never overply it to that degree again :-)
It's way easier to go from underplied to balanced, but Julia has good advice. It's probably just fine as is depending on what you want to do with it. I've been hearing a lot lately about "balanced" yarn being more for show than for actual use, but I'm certainly no expert. You're doing a great job either way! Hope the cold is long gone by now too.
I have no spinning experience so I don't have any tips to offer. but it is pretty yanr all the same.
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