Needles on the Move

Last week we had a really fun class on spinning fat, squidgy singles yarn. (It’s running again in February if you missed out this time, btw). Part of the success of a singles yarn is in the spinning technique, but the real magic is in the finishing.

Remember the whole sleeping-twist thing? The often-bruited advice for achieving non-twisty singles for knitting with is to soak the skein and hang it with a weight to dry. Sadly, although this works in the short term, all it really does is to block the yarn, not permanently set it straight (so to speak).

To finish a singles, it’s best to properly full it a little. Afterwards, it will twist up very little and you can knit with it knowing that your fabric won’t skew sideways. To do this, tie up the skein securely in four places and plunge it into hot soapy water - as hot as your hand can bear. Take it out, squeeze, and plunge into cold. Repeat. Squeeze, and you’ll see that the surface of the yarn has changed - it will be looking a bit fuzzed and felty. give it a good whacking on your work surface or against a door and by now, it should be hanging pretty much in an open loop.

So, on Saturday, we spun, and then we soaked, and shocked and whacked and generally had a ball :-D You can see Alice’s singles in her Morning Surf in progess here, and check out the great smooshy singles spun by Ali:

Don’t forget, there’s a load of scheduled classes in January and February, including a repeat of the singles class. Check out all the details here.

Not sure if I’ll be on Lingr this weekend, I’m hanging out in the Schnee with Kai (woot!) so we might pop on, or we might be knitting by the fire. But that needn’t stop you guys!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 14th, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under General, Spin-In. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.