Mossy Cottage Knits

After I stopped laughing I felt I must let you kn ow this has happened to me too. I just put it back on the bobbin and un wound it a bit. It worked just fine. (besides I don't have but one heavy kettle!)

Yup, definitely looks like very high levels of twist. TMK could re-run it back onto her bobbin in the opposite direction that she plied it. It will resort back to some extra "liveliness" if you wash the finished article, depending on the type of stitch you knit it out of. Nothing that can't be fixed tho. :)

Well, it's either over or under twisted. I'd guess over by the enthusiasm of the yarn.

In this case, garter stitch or seed stitch is your friend since even if the yarn goes boing again it will boing in equal and opposing directions.

(TMK - email me and I'll relay the best plying advice I ever found.)

It looks a lot like my hair used to in the morning, before I lost it all to chemo. I recommend a regular conditioner, a leave-in conditioner, a styling gel and a frizz preventer. That should keep it calm for about 2 hours.

You get to learn a whole lot about yarn when you see it spun. The word you're wanting is "unbalanced", the twist in the plying process (where the wheel is going the other way to the way it was spun) isn't the same as the amount of twist in the singles so you've got that extra twist kinking everything up there. The way that the skein is twisting (clockwise or anti) is the way that TMK needs to spin the wheel when she runs it back onto another bobbin.

Just to make things worse, yarn can look unbalanced when it's not. If you ply a bobbin of single that's sat around a while with one that's freshly spun, the fresh one is more springy and twisty compared to the old one that has got set in its ways and the yarn will look unbalanced until you set the twist. I don't think that's what you've got here though.

A sample would be good, run a bit of it through the wheel again in what you think is the right direction, skein it, wet it and see if it looks better. It looks good now and it will be worth the extra effort.

Iffen ya troll through my archives, you'll find a brillo pad of yarn like that that I spun -- not red, but brown or green, if memory serves. It's pretty traumatic at first, but you get over it. :)

Did she perhaps use the same direction for her plying twist as for the singles?

Great color!

I agree with Sylvia. That looks like classic "plied in the same direction it was spun" yarn. Have TMK run it back through the wheel in the opposite direction to reverse the twist.

In TMK's defense, since I'm sure she's much too modest to say so, the one thing she knows fer sher, even as a beginning spinner, is to ply in the opposite direction from the one in which she spun. But there are a lot of good suggestions here to consider! Also, at some point soon, she'll be taking a one-on-one lesson on plying so things should stop being quite so scary soon! (P.S. She reports that the heavy pans seem to be doing the trick.)

I don't spin much, but when I'm recycling yarn and need to reset the twist and turn it back into something useful again (instead of a pile of yarn that looks like my early nineties hairstyle) I use an old cleaning windex bottle to weight it. You can fill it with as much water as you need to pull the yarn straight, and the trigger of the spray attachment can be used as the hook to hang it from the skein (though that clotheshanger rig TMK has going there is pretty clever).

I love TMK. I can relate on many levels. I think we may be kindred spirits.

And you know, I actually am a little jealous of your vacation because you knocked a bunch of things that have been hanging out on my To Do list for evah.

If you had your car serviced than I would actually be envious!

I know nothing about spinning, so I have absolutely no idea how it happened, but I just about peed my pants envisioning the poor kid who's wearing the sweater that will turn into a twisting pile of curls. Makes me giggle even now, hours later after first reading it. MaryB

I use a nalgene water bottle with however much water is necessary. The problem with ust straightening it with "wet, then let dry while weighted" is that water will restore the blob. If you steam it, it will stay set. I usually steam my singles, becaus they are by nature an unbalanced yarn. You can do this over the spout of a ta kettle, so you have focused steam, and are less likely to scorch yourself. If you have a cheap niddy noddy (pvc is even better) you can just set the taught yarn over a pot of boiling water, and not worry about burns. You may need to slide the yarn around the niddy noddy so all parts get steamed.

PS-the colorway is beautiful.

Overplyed would be my guess - I have had that happen to me too although not quite to that extent. Something I have learned about plying over the past 3 years is that it's easy to overdo the twist.

I agree with the folks who said to run it back through the wheel - wind it into a center pull ball and just feed it into the wheel going in the opposite direction from when it was plyed.

Also, when that is done, if you twist it into a hank in the opposite direction of the ply and leave it sit for a year it will relax a bit more... I just finished a sweater that included some slightly overplyed hanks which had aged a year and things were fine.

One thing that I have that comes in handy is a niddy noddy made of PVC pipes. I wrap the spun yarn on it when I'm done plying and wet it right on the niddy noddy and just let it dry. That way, you don't have to hang weights from it. And TMK likes to build things so it would be perfect. It takes about 10 minutes and costs about $5.00. You can also measure how many inches it takes to go around your niddy noddy once and after you get all your yarn on it, count how many rounds there are and taa daa, you can figure out how many yards you have spun. I also put my handspun on my niddy noddy to handpaint it.

This message has been brought to you by the American Council for PVC Niddy Noddies...

Tina

I'm a vote for the plied in the direction spun (should be easy to check for Z or S in both ply and single....) -- I've been known to wickedly overtwist yarn just for fun, but the only time that ever happened to me was when I Z spun and Z plied it. Mine was the most beautiful pale pink angora fluff, too. One skein, perfect. The next, spun just as tight, but the plied the wrong way, that. I used it as a pillow on the couch for a while. It was that soft and pretty. And HUGE. Isn't it cushy when it's like that?
xo

Thanks for your comments everyone. But, for the record, I plied the opposite direction that I spun the singles. I think part of what happened is the singles were spun on the Louet and then I plied on my new Schacht. I had trouble getting the yarn to take up onto the bobbin when I was plying so I had to keep adjusting the tension and I don't think I plied as tightly as the singles were spun. I am taking a plying lesson on Friday, so we'll see what my teacher has to say. I know I should have waited to ply this until Friday, but I wanted to make yarn, darn it! I had five bobbins of singles and no yarn! ;-) TMK