I have exciting news! I have my first plied and hanked up handspun yarn!
The yellow yarn in the photo is what I used to hold the skein together which is why it doesn’t seem to fit into the hank. I’m still looking for the best yarn to tie my skeins together with, and how best to attach them. These ones wriggled around quite a bit which isn’t ideal, but it’s manageable.
The fiber I used for this one is Nube by Malabrigo that I picked up at The Knitting Tree LA a few months ago on our trip for “new parent orientation” at UCLA where our daughter started this fall. The shop was really lovely and they even invited me to knit night, although I was much too tired after the drive. I was able to pick up some yarn though, as well as this braid of Merino.
I thought the colors in it were really beautiful and I find it easier to see my mistakes while spinning if there is some amount of color variation to the fiber. A friend of mine, after I posted a photo of the Nube in my Discord, let me know that people often have troubles with Nube specifically and linked to some Reddit posts that talk about the issues. I was really thankful that she reached out to me about it, as I inevitably would have struggled, and since I’m so new to this I would have thought it was because of something I was doing. So I followed the advice given and it was just fine.
So, here you can see what the plied bobbin looked like. I realized that I didn’t have a niddy noddy, so I took an extra cut of some closet rod and nailed a paint stirring stick to either end. It worked enough for me to get the yarn into a skein so that I could soak, thwack and hang it to dry, as well as get a rough yardage, but it was a bit too long, and the cross-bar pieces were a bit thin and got bendy with the tension. I’ve since had my dad shorten the rod do the right length and used thicker (and shorter) pieces of wood to make the skein a more manageable length for twisting into a hank.
So, there you have it, I made yarn!
