I'm a Twisted Sister, Part I: Roving vs. Singles

We're quickly approaching my one year spinniversary, the day that Shirley and I learned to spindle spin under the tutelage of Marnie. When I decided that I wanted to learn to spin, I sought out the advice of Tiffany, whose gorgeous spinning I really admired. Tiffany responded with a great list of books and resources and a care package of fibers to play with. Her number one book pick was the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook, and it was the very first spinning-related book I purchased.

"Rose Quartz" merino from Carolina Homespun, still on the bobbin of my Majacraft Rose.

The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook will not teach you about spinning per se, and honestly, the best pamphlets I've seen on spinning itself are the free pdfs offered by spin-off, but it delves rather extensively into dyeing, roving preparation, and sock knitting and is incredibly inspiring. I devoured the whole thing in a weekend. I've been meaning to write a review of it for some time, but for the moment I will just tell you one of my favorite things about the book.

The section on roving preparation is very, very thorough, and emphasizes the benefits of taking the time to carefully divide and pre-draft your roving.

Here's what my Rose Quartz merino looks like before any preparation.

The author, Lynne Vogel, talks about how she spends a great deal of time considering the roving itself and whether to spin from pencil rovings, created by dividing the roving length-wise, or to spin from the fold, a cross-section of the roving. She determines how long she wants her color repeats to be, whether she wants to spin a singles or a plied yarn. She does all this while simply looking at the roving and contemplating what it might be. The choice of how to prepare the roving will greatly affect the look of the yarn that you produce, and Lynne shows us the differences in beautiful color photographs.

For my first skein of Rose Quartz, I made individual pencil rovings and rolled them into bird's nests.

For me, seeing the Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook's pictures of finished yarn next to the roving that produced it was very akin to what I experienced as a new knitter when I could actually see different yarns worked up into swatches. Before you have experience with a given fiber, color, or technique, it can be hard to envision what the result of your efforts will be. (Hence my first lace scarf that I designed using lovely, but thick tweedy wool - not a huge success. Now, I think I could probably finesse a tweedy wool into a lovely lace scarf, because I know the rules and can break them in new and interesting ways. Then, it was just a mess!)

See the vast differences in coloring between the individual pencil rovings?

This particular roving is dyed with long runs of lengthwise color, so when I separated it for spinning prep, I ended up with pencil rovings that vary from one another pretty significantly. The result is a pretty obvious transition between one pencil roving and the next on the bobbin, which you should be able to discern in the top photo. I have always spun from pencil rovings, primarily because I find this the easiest way to manuever on my spindles, but I thought that this time I would experiment, and see what kind of a difference spinning from the fold would make in the final yarn. I believe that spinning from the fold will give the yarn a much more subtle, heathered color, as the individual color runs will mix more rapidly, but we'll see.

Here's a view of the spun singles next to the roving. Would you have known it would come out this way?

I'm on the second bobbin of pencil rovings right now. Either tomorrow or later today I'll ply the yarn (I'll take pictures of the effects of that, too), and then next week we'll see how spinning from the fold works out.

Oh, and if you are wondering about the scale in the bird's nest photos, I use it to determine how much fiber to prep for each bobbin. Theoretically, if you use the same amount of fiber each time, you should not have any leftovers once you ply the yarn. In practice, I'm so new to spinning and to the wheel, that the difference can be significant, but that makes it a good measure of my consistency (or lack thereof!) and spinning progress. I'll take shots of that, too, if you promise not to laugh too hard!