Today I decided to go through my stash of yarn to see what I was going to bring to school, when I stumbled across a bunch of wool that my Aunt had found at a yard sale for me! This means I get to try washing yarn and then balling it. Hence the internet is proving very helpful so I don't accidentally felt the wool (crosses fingers and hopes). I have unwound a few balls of yarn and wound them into loose circles around the back of my kitchen chair. Then I loosely tied the layers together with scraps of acrylic yarn. Now they're all prepped to sit in some lukewarm (NOT HOT for wool) water with some mild detergent and then rinsed by sitting in some lukewarm water without the detergent. I plan to hang them outside to dry on a rack. I also have some interesting non wool yarns picked up at the garage sale. Hopefully I can wash them with the natural colored wool without bleeding the colors together.
Unfortunately there is this really beautiful wool (that sounds contradictory, but it's not!) that is falling apart. It appears like it hasn't been spun very well and it's single ply. So I started looking around on the internet for an answer to respin or ply the yarn together. It looks like I'll need a drop spindle of some sort to spin the yarn but I found this really amazing article how to make your own out of a dowel rod and a few old CDs! (I have about 50 sitting in my room waiting to be donated to the Green Team lady who reuses them for crafts) It looks really cool and easy (to make the spindle at least... spinning itself looks like it will require a lot of patience and practice!) Hopefully I can spin the beautiful brown wool into a usable yarn that won't fall apart in my hands. Or I could just make a mess and have some fun, which is more likely for my first foray into spinning and plying yarn!
But if I ever get any good at spinning yarn I want to try spinning newspaper!
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