Have you noticed how many more spinners there are nowadays? What was once a cozy, tiny group of weirdos has become a loud, brash family. Have you also noticed how many more fibers there are to buy and how many more places to buy it? I never thought I could walk into a knitting store and find beautiful fiber, much less take spinning classes there.
The spinning world is growing, and the spinning world is changing. More spinners are coming from the knitting world. Some come to spinning because they want to create their own yarn, exactly how they want it, choosing every aspect from color to feel to gauge. Some come because they have fallen in love with the braids and batts dyed by one of the hundreds of talented dyers around the world.
Many spinners aren’t interested in buying a fleece or doing their own preparation — they want to spin from the ready-made beauties they buy at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, New York Sheep and Wool Festival (a.k.a. Rhinebeck), Black Sheep Gathering in Oregon, and Madrona Fiber Arts retreat in Washington, as well as from online sites such as Etsy or at their local knitting stores. It’s not even just new spinners who fall into that category of spinners — I am proudly one of them. I’ve been spinning off and on for almost 20 years, and I don’t like to process my own fiber. I know how to do it, and I know the upside to choosing and processing, but I am thoroughly in love with handdyed, commercially processed fiber.
Commercially processed fiber has had a bad reputation in the spinning world as overprocessed and compacted, hard to spin and not as worthy as hand-processed fibers. Like the rest of the fiber world, however, commercial processing has grown and matured, developing nuances beyond compacted, scoured fiber. Fibers are being processed in smaller batches, many locally sourced and processed. And the color — that’s where the magic lies. That’s what draws me across the shop, room, or fairground, keeps me coming back to websites and keeps me spinning. Gone are the days of hobby handdyers who dyed a few braids or batts with Kool-Aid for a local guild sale or fiber fair. The women and men who are dyeing now are artists with full-time businesses. The variety and beauty of their work is astonishing, and my overflowing stash is testament to that.
Many spinners are coming from a knitting background, as I know I did. I spin to use my yarn for knitting. These spinners know about yarn, know what they want in a yarn, and want to know how to make it. They want something unique, something they can’t find in a shop. For a long time, the yarn was the end product, the whole point of the activity, and it still is for some spinners. I consider myself a spinning knitter, and my point is to use the yarn, whether I’m spinning for a particular project or spinning for the joy of it and then finding a project to use it for.
I love knitting with handspun. I love knitting period, but handspun takes it to a different level, even if it’s handspun I didn’t spin. Handspun yarn is lively and has so much to say about how it wants to be. Most mill-spun yarns are passive, but handspun wants a say in the knitting process. I’ve thought long and hard about why I love knitting with handspun, and I came up with five reasons: choice, control, craft, creativity, and connection.
I love having choices. Sometimes I choose a commercial yarn because it’s just right, but nothing looks and feels like handspun yarn. I have yet to knit with a commercial yarn that feels like handspun. Commercial yarn is prepped and spun by machines that hold it under a lot more tension than most spinners would. That tension stretches a little bit of the life, the spring, out of the yarn. Then it’s wound by machine and stacked in boxes, stretching and compressing the fibers more. All this machinery gives a mill an easily repeatable and predictable yarn.
To me, commercial yarns seem a little limp, whereas handspun yarn seems alive, almost as though it breathes. It’s brash and energetic. It can be uneven and sometimes a little unpredictable, but for me that adds to the excitement of knitting with it; it’s never boring.
Because fiber processed specifically for handspinning is usually dyed before it’s spun, the colors in handspun are deeper, and I’m able to manipulate how they fall from variegated tops and rovings into the yarn. Sometimes I want very clear-cut colors; sometimes I want them muddied or blended or in a different order.
The finished fabric is somehow different, too. It looks vibrant and feels lively. It has personality and attitude. Even when I spin just to spin, with nothing particular in mind, I always knit a little with my handspun. It never feels quite done until I hold that little swatch.
One braid, five completely different yarns. From the top, yarns and knitted swatches: (A) fractal spun 2-ply; (B) chain plied; (C) plied as it came; (D) flipped 2-ply; (E) singles
I won’t deny that one of the things I love about knitting with handspun is the control I have over creating the yarn. Sometimes it feels like there are a million different options when it comes to spinning yarn. I narrow it down to seven things and ask myself lots of questions.
What am I spinning for? Am I interpreting a commercial or handspun yarn for a pattern? Am I spinning yarn first, then finding a pattern? Am I just spinning to spin? What type of yarn do I want to end up with?
Breed and fiber. Because of the work of Clara Parkes, Deb Robson, and Beth Smith, most spinners and knitters know that there are different sheep breeds and that the wool from each has different properties that lend themselves to particular yarns. Non-wool fibers, whether animal, plant, or man-made, all help yarn feel and look a particular way, too. What am I looking for in my yarn? What will I use it for? Does a kernel of it lie in breed or fiber choice?
Prep. Am I starting with a fleece or commercially prepared fiber? How will I prepare the fleece? How was the commercial fiber prepared? Each preparation method, no matter the fiber, influences the finished yarn. What do I need for the yarn in my mind?
Color. Am I dyeing my fiber? What colors? Will I dye before or after I prepare my fiber? Before or after the yarn is spun? If I’m using gorgeously dyed top or roving or batts, will I spin the colors as they are or manipulate the color flow somehow? Will I combine the colors with another dyed fiber? Will I combine colors in the draft or ply?
Draft. Do I want compact or lofty yarn? Smooth or textured yarn? Somewhere in between? Am I blending colors here? Am I working with or against the preparation? How much twist do I want?
Ply. Am I plying? How many plies? Am I blending colors here? Do I want a textured or art ply? How much ply twist do I want?
Finish. How will I finish it? Will I full or felt? Will I whack it, snap it, or just hang it? Is there any reason to block the yarn?
Whew! It seems like a lot, but I mostly do all of this in my head in a minute or two. When I’m planning a big or very specific project, I sit and write it all out.
This is the making part, the hands-on part. This is the part where I grow as a spinner and as a knitter by spinning the yarn I knit with. For me, it’s an ongoing conversation back and forth, round and round, between the starting fiber, the finished knitted fabric, and all of the steps in between. My craft is constantly evolving based on curiosity, experience, obsession, and trial and error.
The learning, the questing, and questioning — this might be my favorite part. I am perpetually asking questions like these:
The originality of handspun yarn is astonishing. No two spinners will spin an identical yarn given the same wheel, fiber, and parameters. It can have the same twist, wraps per inch (wpi; see Spinning Speak and Wraps per Inch (wpi)), and gauge, but somehow it won’t look the same. It’s just something that each spinner breathes into his or her yarn when spinning it.
Once I take control of fiber with some intention, my creative mind explodes. It might be the opposite of what works for you, but for me, giving myself even a small parameter, such as “spin yarn for a shawl,” guides my thinking to be more creative. It plucks my brain out of all the overwhelming things and infinity of ideas and settles it into “shawl yarn.” (Well, that’s just 650 ideas for shawls to sort through.)
I love being part of something that reaches forward and back and that has a vibrant “now.” I may not always be in the thick of it posting on Ravelry (I’m shy that way), but I love the underground rumble I always feel. I love that when I have an idea or question I can look at old books and magazines and search online and find a variety of answers and opinions. I love that when new magazines, books, or conversations come up, there is always something new, a new twist, a new process.
In-person spinning energy is crazy. When I spin with friends or go to a fiber sale, class, retreat, or one of the big events, I am always full and exhausted afterward. It takes me a while to work through the things I learned and even longer to try them out. There is such a feeling of process and liveliness when spinners get together; it’s the best, really.
Spinning your own yarn gives you control, for example, over how many plies to use for a specific project.
This book is for spinning knitters and for spinners who are interested in creating yarns that would be good for knitting (and other things, too). Chances are that if you picked up this book you are a spinner and a knitter — or you are one and about to become the other. I assume that you already know how to spin. This isn’t a beginner’s learn-to-spin book. Rather, it’s about how to spin to get a specific yarn as well as a spruce-up-your-spinning book.
I came to spinning after first being a weaver, then a knitter. I thought I knew about commercial yarns, but spinning taught me things about how yarns work, why they do so, and how to get them to behave. Spinning taught me why some of my early knitting efforts were abject failures, and the reasons included using the wrong yarn or yarn structure.
It’s safe to say that most spinners who pick up this book are knitters, too. This makes you an educated spinner, because you know about yarn. In fact, you know a lot about how yarn is constructed, how it behaves, and (mostly) what you find unique: something in colors that you can’t find or that commemorate a trip, a yarn with more or fewer plies, a yarn that stripes differently. The possibilities are vast. You want to spin to make something you want to see come from that gorgeous braid you fell in love with.
Spinning is a craft that can help you grow not only as a spinner but as a knitter.
Yarnitecture is simply the concept that all of the component parts of spinning a yarn build on each other to create the yarn you envision. It is the idea of exploring connections, and then learning how to get the parts to work together (or against each other) to create exactly the yarn you want. It’s like creating a building or a home. In this book, I hope to save you a few steps by pointing you in a direction without dictating a must-do.
Sometimes my ideas are as concrete as a specific pattern, while at other times they are rather general: “I think I’ll knit a sweater . . . or maybe a shawl.” In the past, I spun without really thinking too much, hoping that the thoughts in my brain would convey that certain need-to-know to my hands, fiber, and wheel, and that I would magically spin exactly the yarn that would work for my dream project. I would say that 90 percent of the time I failed miserably. I failed on so many levels. Most of the time I didn’t even have enough fiber!
I like to pick at things, however, to poke things with a stick and figure out why and how to do things better. So I started thinking and reading. What I found was that there are so many possibilities for what can go into spinning for a knitting project that it’s a wonder anyone does it at all. It’s paralyzing. But when I spun, I started with an idea, and then, by taking all of the component parts and actions, with their million variables, I arrived at a plan. Yes. Then I let it all stew for a while, doing more spinning and thinking about all of the parts that go into making and building yarn. I was still a little overwhelmed, but it was a focused overwhelmed — like when I clean out my closet, get everything out, and then think, holy crap, that is a lot of stuff — but there’s no turning back now. I continued to spin, made lists, and talked to all of the spinning people I know.
One day I was reading a book, not about spinning or yarn or knitting, and an idea politely tapped me on the shoulder: “It’s like building a house.” So I decided to break down the project I was working on into these parts: an idea, the fiber, the preparation of the fiber, how I spin the fiber, how I finish the fiber, and how I knit with the fiber — because handspun is a different beast from commercial yarn. Spinning includes drafting and plying, and then there’s the complex and frustrating and fabulous idea of color.
Next, I started wondering how someone building a house would describe this. I often find that if I take something that confuses or overwhelms me and cloak it in a different context, it takes the scariness, the panic, the overwhelmingness out of it. I went through the parts of a house and the rudimentary parts of the building process in my head. I have never built a house or studied architecture, but I came up with components: the blueprint, the foundation, the frame, the walls, the roof, the door, the paint, and the landscaping. I was envisioning and building yarns for a specific use — I was a yarnitect.
I came up with a method that made sense to me based on what (little) I know about house building and what I know about getting from idea to finished project. I started making very conscious decisions at each step in the process. At first, it took a great deal of time because I did a lot of research and sampling in order to make my decisions, but now that I’ve been following this process for a while, it takes less time — or it can take much less time. I still am a sucker for experimenting.
This process first became a proposal for this book, then the outline, and now it serves as the table of contents.
For this book, I contacted designers to create things from handspun. Some of these knitting designers are also spinners, and some just appreciate and really love to knit with handspun yarn. Each one is an amazing designer; each one I have admired for years. They have created beautiful patterns for you to knit with your handspun.
In this book, I offer guidance based on my spinning and my research, and I show lots of samples. This book is a shortcut for spinning knitters, a little education and a lot of tips and tricks. Most of all, it’s a heaping helping of “just get in there and do it.”
See full project in chapter 9.
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Main Measurements:
bust circumference, with front bands overlapping: 331⁄2 (371⁄2, 411⁄2, 451⁄2, 483⁄4, 523⁄4, 563⁄4, 603⁄4)"
waist circumference, with front bands overlapping: 271⁄4 (311⁄4, 351⁄2, 391⁄4, 421⁄2, 461⁄2, 501⁄2, 541⁄2)"
hip circumference, with front bands overlapping: 351⁄4 (391⁄4, 431⁄4, 471⁄4, 501⁄2, 541⁄2, 581⁄2, 621⁄2)"