So on Thursday, I wrote a bit about core spinning. An even more basic way to core spin is to just hold some fiber perpendicular to your core, and as it spins, it will grab ahold of it and create a wonderful light fuzzy something of a yarn. You can also do this with locks.
I had a lot leftover after the tailspinning escapade I showed you earlier, and I thought this would be a little easier. So I took all the light blue locks, held their butt ends (that is what they are called) up to the core as I spun, and let the core grab as much of the lock as it wanted.
I found that, after the butt had secured itself around the core, I could move the lock up and down the core to make it grab the whole lock.
When I started to run out of light blue, I mixed the last of the light blue locks with the dark blue, then did the rest of the dark blue.
When corespinning locks in particular, Amy King recommends following up the corespinning process with a binder thread to secure things in place. This means that you take the yarn you’ve corespun and put it through the wheel again, plying it in the opposite direction it was spun with a thread. I just used some white sewing thread. You also do this when making boucle yarns, which I tried forever ago.
I experimented with holding the thread and yarn at different angles to the oriface, but I found I had to change my technique based on whether I was trying to secure a fat lock or a skinny bit of wrapped yarn. Eyeballing it was good enough, for the most part.
The end result is pretty flippin’ cool. It looks much more like boucle than the last time I tried, and plying it with the binder thread made it almost perfectly balanced. I’m not clear on how you’d balance a corespun yarn otherwise.
I’m trying not to think about whether this yarn would be good for anything; I’m just admiring its qualities instead. Play doesn’t always need a purpose.
Osborn Fiber Studio 