Handspun Yarn

My first Ebay roving purchase. :-) This became the spun socks on my knitting page. This was an excellent roving to start on, spun with a drop spindle as opposed to a wheel, which is what I use now. It spun up fairly quickly, easily, and had a nice long staple length. The dominant color was pale green, but there was a core of pink in the roving, with bits of darker colors throughout.

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This is the second roving, and the first large-scale purchase of roving, I ever bought off of Ebay. The colorway is lovely -- all deep sunset and fire colors with a nice generous dash of dark fuschia. Gorgeous.

Unfortunately, the texture is not as nice. It's Romney, and is very rough and scratchy, even for Romney. Easy enough to spin, but the roving itself is incredibly dense, so it must be pre-drafted in order to be handily dealt with.

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I'm cheating a bit, here; I'm not sure if this is a Romney roving. It handles like Romney, though. Another lovely roving from Linden Lane Farms, who I can recommend wholeheartedly for their good products and excellent service. This spins up in any weight, from the chunky heavy worset here to the near-fingering-weight that you'll see in the Afterglow roving.

This is Navaho 3-Ply, which means that the single is essentially drawn into a very long chain stitch and allowed to ply itself. It's wonderful if you can spin a thin single, which I can. You can isolate color changes if you desire, and you don't have to worry about wasting bits and odd ends of singles since you can ply it exactly to the end of the bobbin.

This is likely to become a winter headband.

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And here is the next lovely colorway from Linden Lane Farms -- a core of dark blue with an outer haze of red. It spins up into an absolutely incandescent deep jewel tone that I can't even describe. This yarn is destined to be a pair of gloves.

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Another Ebay surprise when I got a good amount of this in the mail and found that it was far lovelier than I'd anticipated. Black merino with bits of very light pink and green silk fluff sprinkled through it. I distinctly remember watching a documentary on national parks on PBS while spinning this, and it became the Broad Street Mittens that you'll find on my knitting page.

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Some of the best merino rovings I've ever got were from The Joy of Handspinning. All of the various merino rovings you'll see on this page come from them. If I could pick only one fiber to spin for the rest of my life, it would be merino. You can see in the picture how the Navaho 3-Ply technique allows the spinner to isolate the color changes in the roving; the yarn changes very abruptly from eggplant to pumpkin.

I still haven't figured out what to make from this. I've toyed idly with thoughts of mittens, another winter headband, a hat ... There isn't really enough of it to make anything substantial, so the headband may be the only choice.

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Another winner from The Joy of Handspinning, this in a colorway called Sapphire. I bought them out of this.

This yarn, along with the yellow and pink from another source the name of which I can't remember (that was excellent roving too, and a good supplier), became the second pair of sun-yarn gloves on my knitting page.

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Soy. Yes, you read that right. Soy. A friend of mine has informed me that, in her opinion, I am now spinning tofu.

It's hard to explain how this feels. There is a certain ... squeakiness ... to vegetable fibers that doesn't exist in animal protein fibers. It also gets all over the place when you spin with it. Despite this, it spins up well, strong, glossy, and beautiful. This is a very thin weight 3-ply.

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Again, more lovely merino from The Joy of Handspinning. You can see the cranberry and pumpkin yarns that became the first pair of spun-yarn gloves that I made on my knitting page. You can also deduce that I used the same rovings to make the Pumpkin and Eggplant Navaho 3-Ply that is pictured above.

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You have no idea how wonderful silk roving feels. Persian kitten tummies can only dream of being like silk roving. This is a tin of various rovings in the process of being knit up into a pullover with an antler cable down the front on size 2 needles. The colors are amazing, the hand is excellent, and when you overspin it, it becomes positively glossy.

The rovings are dyed individually by The Silk Worker, who I can recommend without reservation. I believe she also sells individually dyed bells for people who like spinning from silk bells.

I should also confess that I'm not 100% certain if this is 2-ply or not. It might be Navaho 3-ply.

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This is a nice idea for a variegated yarn -- one ply of uniform yellow, the other sequentially yellow and pink. When plied together, the yarn goes from yellow to variegated. To the lower right you can see what I had wanted to do with this yarn and the Sapphire 2-Ply, which was a sweater with this pattern in it. Someday ...

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