Chain-plied mystery fiber, from a plying ball!

The finished yarn.  

Chain-plied, of course, as it is my favorite plying method.  But this time, I plied from a plying ball!  

I only had a vague idea of what a plying ball was before yesterday.  I knew some sort of vague hand-wavey explanations of how to create one, but hadn't made my own just yet.  But yesterday I found myself with no extra bobbins and a single that wanted to be plied up, so I made a plying ball to free up my bobbin.  

If you've ever chain-plied from a bobbin and also wound your own ball of yarn, you are fully qualified to wind your very own plying ball for chain plying.  

Here's the very start of mine, winding the ball directly from my spinning wheel:

And the final product! 

I wound my plying ball very tightly.  Usually when hand-winding a ball of yarn, you don't want to stretch the yarn when winding.  That will, given enough time, make the yarn lose elasticity and spring.  But since I knew I'd be plying immediately, I wasn't concerned with that at all. 

Winding it tightly also helped keep the energized singles from tangling.  As you can see in the ball-in-progress picture, the singles really want to tangle up.   

I kept the brake band on my spinning wheel while I chain "plied".  That helped keep the bobbin from running wild.  

Plying was very fast.  Usually when chain plying, I end up needing to use a slower speed on my wheel to form the chains.  But when using the plying ball, I found myself using the same speed that I used to spin the singles.  

The yarn was slightly underplied initially.  

After washing, it was very balanced though. 

I am very happy with how the yarn turned out, however, there's not very much yardage!  

I cast on a hat, and realized that I would have enough for maybe three-quarters of a hat.  Definitely more than half a hat.  But also definitely not enough for a full hat.  

Not sure what my plans for this yarn are anymore.  I was really looking forward to an aran-weight hat!  

The yarn is currently in time out for not producing enough yardage for a hat. 

A venture into spinning fiber into yarn

I've been knitting for the majority of my life, but always bought yarn ready-to-knit, as most knitters probably do.  I have wondered about spinning my own yarn, but I've never really wanted to either buy a drop spindle (very slow?) or buy a wheel (expensive!).  And I kept telling myself I had more than enough yarn already, so I shouldn't need to spin my own yarn. 

Well, based on this post's title, I bet you can figure out what happened. 

I bought an electric eel! 

Not the animal, but the spinning wheel.  They're mini e-spinners made by Dreaming Robots, and meant to be affordable and portable wheels.  

Update: I made a YouTube video about the EEW Nano! 

I bought the purple one (there's a black one too, but it's so tiny and cute, purple just felt right).  The yarn guides aren't the ones it came with -- my SO 3D printed me these: vampyyy's EEW Nano yarn guide.  Not pictured is the tension knob, also 3D printed (and also by vampyyy). 

I was really struggling with the tension system that the Nano came with, as the tiniest adjustments had extraordinarily large effects on take-up and twist.  The tension knob really helps.  I also had to figure out that over-spinning/too much twist (in other words, not enough uptake) means add tension.  And too much uptake means remove tension. 

I bought pencil roving from this Etsy shop, as the internet had told me pencil roving is a good fiber format to learn how to spin. 

I don't think I'd even seen roving in person before (somehow!) and I was very surprised at how soft and squishy the roving was.  Honestly wanted to not spin it and just leave it alone, as a fluffy pillow of fiber.  But that would be silly. 

Squishy squishy roving!

I will spare you the details of how my very first attempts at spinning went -- the short summary is "not well".  Everything from over-spun to under-spun, but not really much in between.  Anyway. 

Here's my first few 2-ply yarns:

Yarns #1, 2, and 4

Yarn #3 was not included in the above picture because there wasn't enough twist in the singles, and when I tried to ply them, they sort of just flew apart.

 

Yarn #3.  Well, it was supposed to be a yarn.

Anyway.  Yarn #5 was a chain-plied yarn, and it turned out really well, I think.  I'm a big fan of chain-plying now.  Before I attempted it, I assumed the points where new loops were drawn through would be bulky or visible -- this is not true at all! 

Yarn #5, single and ready to mingle, I mean, be plied.

Yarn #5, plied and caked.

Yarn #5 turned out to be somewhere around DK/bulky.  And coincidentally, I made it exactly one ounce (30 grams). 

Since the EEW Nano wheel is pretty small, I had to use two full bobbins for the singles, and one very full bobbin to ply.  I guess I'll have to get better at joining yarns securely and invisibly! 

I knit up yarn #5 into a swatch to see how it knit up:

Swatching yarn #5.  Only used half.

I didn't use up all of yarn #5, as I plan to make a weaving with my first few yarns to memorialize them, but I'm very pleased with this swatch.  Because this proves I can make useable yarn.  Not cost-effective, not time-efficient, but yarn nonetheless.