Leftovers

Day 184: At the end of any plied spinning project, the spinner will probably have some yardage left over on one bobbin. If this is a short length, it can be pulled out until the end is reached, then doubled back and carefully spliced so that the remainder can be spun up (bottom photo, double ply white Corriedale). However, if there is too much left to stretch out across your living room with a weight at the bottom of the loop, you have two choices: leave it on the bobbin if you intend to spin more of the same fiber at some point in the (possibly) distant future, or you can have some fun playing with it to try out a new technique. In this case, I needed to free up a bobbin in order to begin a new project and had about 100 yards of Corriedale single-ply left over. I decided it was time to try making bouclé (upper photo).

Bouclé is a labour-intensive yarn. First of all, you will need two Z-twist strands to ply together. At least one of them should be hand-spun because this is a spinning project after all, but the the second can be anything you feel is suitable for a core. The core strand isn't going to show much in the finished yarn. I went hunting in my fiber stash for a skinny Z-twist. Most 4-ply commercial yarns wind up as S-twist because the singles are spun as Z, so nothing in my yarn bins was going to work, but crochet cotton had the proper twist. The one I pulled out to use as my core thread was also a leftover, the tail end of an ancient ball of 20 weight. It was green. "Eh," I said to myself, "it's an experiment. Who cares?" The next step was to select a binder from my sewing thread drawer. I found a blue-green which matched "close enough for government work." Now I was ready to start my bouclé.

To spin bouclé, the core yarn is held in one hand and fed onto the bobbin smoothly. The cover yarn (in this case, single ply Corriedale wool) is held in the other hand, and as the core yarn is drawn onto the bobbin, the cover yarn is pushed up along it to form loose coils around the core. This is repeated in steps at the spinner's discretion, and the two plies are spun in the opposite direction from how they were originally spun (two Z-twists are spun using an S-twist to combine them). To help you visualize the result, the two-ply will then look something like a spring (cover) with a swab stick (core) in its center. When you are done plying the two together, you are ready to add a third ply using sewing thread, and going back to a Z twist. The sewing thread serves as a binder to hold the cover strand in place, and to open it out into the typical "snarls" which give bouclé its unique look (top photo). I'm not sure how I'll use the yarn (roughly 35 yards), but it was fun to make.