Osborn Fiber Studio

This post is part of a spin-along through 51 Yarns by Jacey Boggs Faulkner, in the Wool n’ Spinning community. For other posts in this series, check here.

Well that’s disappointing! I wrote this post over two weeks ago and thought it got posted, but it seems to have been eaten by a goblin. THEN I rewrote it and tried again to post it, but it seems determined not to post. So I’m trying again!

It’s probably for the best, since I did go on and on about “semi” yarns and what they mean and don’t mean. I’ll give you the short version, with the cool excel thing I made.

To put it briefly, if you do everything on the top line, you’re making true woolen. If you do everything on the bottom line, you’re making true worsted. If you do anything else, you’re doing a semi yarn.

That’s quite a spectrum of possibilities to put under one heading. So one way you can break it down is by prep. The consensus at the moment seems to be – if your prep (the left hand column) is something above the line, it’s semi woolen, and if it’s below the line, it’s semi worsted.

Really what you should do is just record what you did.

Here’s what I did:

Back in like April, I made these puni style rolag things. I used one hand card as a mini blending board, and made a sandwich with colourful targhee as the bread and white flicked Suffolk as the filling. I spun it short backwards.

It ended up remarkably similar to the yarn I showed you in the post about yarn 11 (although this one was spun much earlier; see above re: goblins). I’m not sure that this one is obviously more woolen than the other. The only difference between the fibres (aside from Suffolk vs. Corriedale as an add-in) is that these were rolled vertically into puni-style rolags, and the others were rolled horizontally into cigars.

I find the color difference fascinating. The colors between this one and the true(ish) woolen (left) are identical; same amount of white. The only difference is that the true woolen was carded for two passes. The semi yarn is much more bright and speckled looking.

I’m disappointed this wasn’t posted when I thought it was two weeks ago, since I had this nice series all planned out, but I’m sure you get the gist. I’m moving in 11 days.