Knit Sisters

The drawback to using the beloved five-pitch English combs is that you are left with quite a bit of waste fiber.  Now, being the frugal soul that I am, I had to purchase a smaller set of combs so as not to completely waste said waste fiber.

So, when I combed that handpainted roving, I ended up with little bundles of fluff.  I combed that fluff with my double-row handheld Louet combs, along with some short pieces of mohair, and spun up the resulting sliver into a fine singles.  The colors became even more muted with the additional combing and with the addition of the white mohair.  It was a very pretty little bobbin of yarn, but it was indeed quite little.

 

I let this little beauty sit for a little bit, while I thought about what to do with it.  I knew I wanted to ply it with something, but what? 

A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of weakness, I purchased this largish bag of raw kid mohair from a woman in the local spinning guild.

 

What can I say?  The price was right, and she’s a local breeder of angora goats.  This is fiber from a bona fide Missouri goat.  That makes such a purchase almost noble, no?  (Supporting the local economy and all.)  But this stuff takes some serious fiber preparation.  First off, there’s the washing–we won’t go there in this post.  Suffice it to say that it is no joke.  After that, there’s the combing.

 

 

Then you have to pull the sliver from the combs.

 

You end up with something quite, quite lovely in and of itself, but it still isn’t even spun into anything yet.

 

Then you spin.

Then you have to ply the mohair strand with the mohair/wool strand.  (Because, as you probably guessed, that is what I decided to do with that little bobbin of singles.)  Wind it off on your trusty kniddy-knoddy, and you end up with one (!) skein of mohair/wool 2-ply yarn.  (Pictured on Monday, remember?)

And, because I do this for fun,  I’m going to do it all again with the leftovers I get when I put this roving through the five-pitch combs.

Then I’ll have two different, yet coordinating, skeins of yarns.  Yup, that’s the plan.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Spinning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.