After the disappointments recounted yesterday, I want to end the review of our little spin weekend on a high note. Yarn with beads in it is mega cool stuff, almost universally expensive, and gorgeous nigh unto irrisistability. Tilli Thomas and Art Yarns are among the most mainstream producers of such goodies, and they are on the very highest end of specialty yarn. The only other access to such delights is handspun. And by golly, I was going to try it.

I pulled out a gem to be the main ply; 2 oz. of completely gorgeous merino/silk acquired (evidently) from the Cloverleaf Farms booth (I’m pretty sure that link is the right Cloverleaf Farms; the pictures of her display of top looked the same).

I split it in half and dashed it off into completely gorgeous singles in no time at all. I was spinning thick and thin, semi-woolen, and fast; this top was loose and open, so it was easy as pie.

Next, I took the ample leftovers of white singles I had spun up for the horrible tailspun, and endowed it with all the leftover beads from Rachel’s Tears. I have no idea where my beading needle is, so I just threaded a regular sewing needle with sewing thread, tied the thread to my yarn, and off I went. I spaced the beads about 2″ apart, which meant I had to continuously slide the rest of the beads down the single. Predictably, this led to a deal of breakage and frustration. This also meant that I could only put on as as many beads at a time that I could slide down without too much headache. If I do this again, I will put the beads on a thinner, more stable yarn; maybe even a thread.

This is a very effective way to eat up beads in a hurry. I was only a third of the way through the red singles when I ran out, so I spun the rest of it together. The result – two glorious little yarns, probably heavy-worsted-to-bulky-ish, about 60 yards each.

Sizeable in girth, but delicate in composition. I am in love, but you probably knew that. It’s hard not to love something that has passed through your own fingers so many times, especially when its final destination – a garment – remains a mystery of potential.

And this was so easy! I should over-order beads every time, so I can make more fun stuff like this. It’s a lot less work than knitting with beads, let me tell you.

This brings the recounting of our spinning retreat to a close. Appearances to the contrary, I have been knitting… and more. Much of it is still on the DL, as I have an unaccountable aversion to showing future designs while they’re still WIPs. At least for “the series,” as its come to be called around here. But there’s other knitting on the go, a bit, and we’ve been gardening, and enjoying things like sunshine. Speaking of sunshine, happy solstice! Engage in some redeemed paganism. I think I’m going to go sit on the porch, under the dappled light through the maple, and read Sigurd and Gudrun and Made from Scratch.

Even though I’m taking forever to wash the silver fleece, both Mom and I opted for the speedy route when it came to washing our Cormo cross. And during our spinning retreat, Mom showed me up close and personal how she uses her new combs to process this fine, short-stapled fiber into perfectly spinnable top. (Mom got her info from a couple of videos, like this one. But as is our mantra, why not add a photo tutorial to the mix of overinformation on these here internets?)

Combing, according to mum, is most appropriate for short-stapled, superfine wools like cormo and merino; perhaps also pure ramboullet or finer corriedales.

Because Mom was careful to preserve lock structure when she washed this fleece, it’s easy for her to pull out a few locks. She slides the butt ends onto the comb that she’s clamped to the table (be careful, those points are sharp!) until the comb is about half full.

She then uses the other comb to gently pull the locks off the clamped comb. Here she demonstrates the sideways motion required; you can move the comb any direction but straight down.

When most of the fiber is on the free comb, there’s a little bit left on the clamp comb. She’ll use these leftovers to make her first bit of top. She starts at one side of the comb and pulls it off, moving slowly toward the other side.

A wee strip of soft perfection remains, ready to be spun quickly, easily, and deliciously.

The one downside of combing is that it produces more waste than carding. Here are some of the useless bits of butt leftover on the comb. Generally, these are the bits you wouldn’t want in your yarn anyway, containing nepps and other unpleasantness. If you were so inclined, I imagine you could save these bits to make felted dryer balls, which friend A turned me on to and I haven’t gotten around to trying yet.

After that initial tuft is taken care of, you can use the free comb, still full of fluff, to reload the clamped comb.

Now you have a new wisp from which you can pull off another wee bit of top.

I cannot say enough how delicious the results looked to spin, and how I felt just a little bit covetous the whole time. (Like I have time or room for another piece of equipment… wait, in our new house, I kind of do.)

Mom spun up some lofty singles from both the lighter and darker parts of the fleece, and plied them in such a way that we could see all different color combinations. It’s so cushy and soft and smooth! I’ve decided I’m going to finish with the silver first, but boy-o… am I excited to take a whack at this sometime in the not-so-distant future.

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.

So while we’re on the subject of ridiculous yarns, let’s get even weirder.

I received these bags of hand-dyed locks as a destash gift from the incomparably lovely B.W., and every now and then I would run into them and wonder what to do with them. One could always just card and spin them up normally, but these locks are special, and resist such plebian treatment.

Why are these locks special? I know nothing but what I’ve seen browsing the fairs, but some breeds (I know at least Lincoln and Cotswald) grow their wool in a unique lock structure that holds together into thick strands. I’ve seen demonstrations how to just knit with locks, though to be honest, it looks a little ridiculous. But lately I’ve had a lot of exposure to Jazz Turtle, who seems to be the master of a technique called “tailspinning.” The idea of this technique is that the base of a lock is, well, locked, onto a core yarn, with the rest of it left hanging.

I could have read a book on the subject, or I could at least have taken ten minutes and found a couple you tube videos on how to do it. But you know how it is when you get in a rush of projects… a couple of pictures in Spin Control and I felt enough of an expert to give it a whack.

The first step was to spin  up some singles – way too much, of course, but white singles always come in handy. This is more dorset from Aunt K, who gave me a few pounds of it when Doris first came into my life.

Next, I prepped some locks, to make the flow of spinning them a little easier. You can see how most of them have a very clearly defined tip and a fluffy, indistinct base.

To get the locks attached to the yarn, the basic idea is to trap them between two plies. I placed them every 8″ or so.

After dividing the plies. I placed a lock between them, and let a few more twists go into the plies.

But I couldn’t just let it stay like this, because the locks will just pull out. So next, I split the plies again, forcing the twist to scrunch up close to where the lock was positioned, and dragged the lock through again. That, ehem, locked it on place.

There’s no denying, both on the bobbin and off, this is easily the most ridiculous looking yarn I’ve ever made.

I should probably have admitted to myself before I started that all the colors I was given don’t quite go together.

Mom learned from my trial attempt, and drew a few colors from her own extensive collection of lincoln locks to complement some fuscia singles she spun up. She picked smaller bits of lock, positioned them closer to each other, and instead of just attaching the base, she centered the lock across the plies. The shorter, fuzzier yarn she made looks a little less like traditional tailspin, but looks a lot less like the barf of a deranged, wool-obsessed clown.

Again, my equipment got in the way; this is going on the list of things I won’t try again without a bulky flyer. But I also have a huge amount of respect for what Esther at Jazz Turtle does, and I have a lot of reading and experimenting to do if I ever want to do this again. But quirkiness is still the point of this technique, and I have no doubt that my tailspun will make some exceedingly quirky boot toppers.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, my silk hankie thread was next followed by my first-ever intentional novelty yarn. Core spun yarn, that is; specifically core spun singles.

The singles in question were 1.6 oz. of “fine wool,” a takeaway from 2011’s spin in. And, I thought, very nearly Kirby colored.

I wish to picture this fiber also with our bible for the weekend: Spin Control by Amy King. This book is perfect for the spinner just budding out of the beginner category, answering most basic-to-intermediate questions with clarity, conciseness, and excellent pictures. It ends with a short chapter on novelty yarn. Entire books have been written on spinning novelty yarn, but this is just that for me – a novelty – and I don’t know that it will stick. Definitely a one-chapter level of commitment. But I would commend this book to anyone; I was particularly converted by her chapter on sampling.

Also, we moved outside. The weather was perfect for a little porch spinning!

But I digress. This Kirby-Colored “fine wool” was true to its name; it was whipped up into some gorgeously imprecise Kirby-colored singles in about half an hour. Why don’t I spin for sweaters out of fiber like this? Oh yeah, because it’s prohibitively expensive and would pill like the dickens, probably even in a 2-ply. But it’s so nummy.

Step the next: dig through the stash to find a core. This little ball of crochet cotton has quite the story. My dear in-laws, on one of their international adventures, actually called us from Scotland to see if there was anything we would like for a souvenir. My first wool-related association with that country was, at the time, Shetland lace. Could they possibly maybe find some Shetland lace? Not that I knew where it is produced or where they could find it, nor that I had yet discovered that Shetland lace is more a historical phenomenon than a current one. They did manage to find some kind of yarn-etc.-selling store, although the sales girl had no idea what they were talking about. She thought maybe I meant this.

I have long treasured this little ball for their efforts, imagining the day that I would be overwhelmed with the desire to crochet tiny pineapples. Mercifully, the day came a little sooner that I was told by Ms. King that crochet cotton makes an excellent core for core-spun yarns.

What is core spinning, you ask? The basic idea is that you have some very durable core, and you hold it so it’s coming directly out of the wheel’s oriface. (That is absolutely a technical term, and I can almost say it in mixed company with a straight face.) The wrap, which might be existing yarn, or just fiber, or locks, or whatever, is held perpendicular to the core and wrapped around it by the twist going into the core.

In the case of a singles core spun yarn, the singles just wrap themselves around the core with nary a care. I had to push them up to bunch them into beautiful coils, and I found it helpful if I occasionally pulled on the wrapping yarn. In its eagerness to be wrapped around the core, it sometimes jumped on too loosely, making slubs out of looseness instead of out of irregularities in the yarn. I wanted the slubs, but I also wanted the yarn to be at least kinda stable.

Easy peasy, right? Well, yes, if you have the right tools.

See the coil stretched out just before it reaches the first hook? My flier isn’t really meant for bulky yarn, let alone novelty yarn. So with this, and with all the novelty yarns I spun this weekend, my delight was marred by the fiber getting continually stuck in the oriface. (yes, yes.) Not to mention it getting stuck on the hooks, which happily turned every which way and made a mess of things. I had to wind the yarn onto the bobbin by manually turning the bobbin in relation to the flier, and the final yarn isn’t as even in its wrappiness as I had hoped.

But you gotta admit, it looks pretty flippin’ cool. The variation in the fiber between light and dark enhances the shading effect of the coils, making them pop even more.

It looks even better now that I’ve blocked it; it’s quite energized in these pictures. I can’t imagine knitting with it; I’ll probably just wear it as a cold-weather necklace next time I have a snazzy evening engagement. I promise I’ll wear it with a more appropriate outfit than below. And I’ll probably comb my hair.