Bobbin Along

Day 168: Just call me Red, Red Robin 'cuz I'm bob-bob-bobbin along! This week's spinning projects included finishing up a second bobbin (4 ounces) of a Merino wool/bamboo blend and allowing it to rest for a few days alongside a fully loaded companion. A short nap improves its disposition when it's time to ply. Most spinners prefer to let the fibers relax into the twist imparted in spinning for a day or two before plying. Call it "fiber yoga," if you will, for after having bent into contortions, the fiber now needs to maintain its pose to achieve the greatest benefit. In the meantime, I broke out a manual tahkli and a free sample which came with an order of wool top, a luscious moss green blend of Merino and alpaca. The freebie yielded a whole 16 meters of double-ply lace weight yarn, just enough to add a few rows to the top edge of sock cuffs. That said, it's not a fiber I would care to spin on a regular basis, the alpaca having a tendency toward fuzziness like Angora. I sneezed a lot during that spinning session, despite the fact that alpaca fiber is hypoallergenic. With a few days under its belt, the wool/bamboo blend is ready to be plied now, but must wait in line until I am finished with another colourway of the same product currently on the wheel.

Handcuffed To The Wheel

Day 163: And there I was, handcuffed to the wheel for the duration. No, I hadn't been arrested. I'd made a plying bracelet from the last of the singles on one bobbin and was finishing up eight ounces of a lovely Merino-bamboo blend, but I was going to be there a while as the yarn uncoiled itself from my wrist. Had I taken it off my hand...to answer the call of nature, say, or because someone showed up on my doorstep...I might never have been able to untangle it.

A few posts back, I mentioned a plying bracelet, referring to it as "a rat's nest," which isn't truly accurate. It's actually a means by which the thread can be drawn off from both ends simultaneously so that it can be plied with itself. The method for winding it onto the fingers seems complex at first, but once you've mastered it, the action is not difficult to maintain. Assuming the right hand will be the hand nearest the body when spinning, the singles is passed around the back of the hand (for this example, the left edge of the hand as the palm is facing you), brought to the front and counter-clockwise around the middle finger, taken to the back of the hand again following the same path, then brought around the opposite (right) side of the hand, clockwise around the middle finger, and then to the back of the hand again following the path it just travelled. The motion is repeated until all the singles has been wound onto the hand. Then the loops around the middle finger are carefully removed from it, and the bracelet is slid onto the wrist. The end is joined to the end of the singles on the bobbin which was emptied first, and plying can be continued normally. The singles in the plying bracelet feeds from both its outer and inner wraps, and only occasionally does the spinner need to dip between the two strands to keep it from tangling. This technique is sometimes referred to as "Andean plying," but its true origins are unclear and the subject of contention among spinners. In any event, the method was developed in the dim, dark days of drop spindles, long before the "modern" spinning wheel was invented. You have to admire the ingenuity!

It took the better part of two days to ply up eight ounces of Paradise Fibers Bambino plus 60 yards of cotton I'd spun on the charkha. With another bobbin already full of a different Bambino colourway, I desperately needed to free up a bobbin in order to continue. Now I'm back to spinning singles, but another Plyday is coming soon, and I'll undoubtedly have an hour or so when I'm once again handcuffed to the wheel.