Archive for category: We couldn’t fit it in the print issue!

words and photos by Sarah Elizabeth

Your first textured creative yarn (art yarn) may feel like a disaster. I know mine did! Learning to draft thick and then thin, auto wrap thread, and try out other textured techniques left me with no shortage of “bad yarn”: yarn that at first glance and handle felt like it would be better if I gave up on it altogether. However, with a few simple tips and tricks you can take your first trials with textured creative yarn from bottom-of-the-barrel yarns to stash-enhancing yarns.

As a lover of both texture and colour, I consider handspun yarns to be the crown jewels of my collection, and I include my first handspun in this collection of yarn jewels. Not because I was some sort of amazing natural who spun the perfect textured yarn from the get-go, but because in its imperfections I can still find inspiration. I was not, and I am not, afraid to tweak my first version, second version, and all the versions that come after.

It is truly rare that in any learning process our first attempts are what we envisioned. Sometimes those first attempts can feel utterly hopeless; the magic happens when we keep with something and let nothing go to waste. It is true that sometimes we just need to start again from scratch, and in this case those yarn fragments, barely-spun pieces, and springy bits of fibre can have a home in your scrap bin: pull them apart, cut them up, and card them into a wild and wonderful batt to combo spin with some roving.

The issues

First yarns usually have a few common problems: they often have weak spots, are of an uneven tension (overspun/underspun), and have uneven width – unintentional thick and thin spots that lack flow.

Weak spots

Weak spots are areas that are too thin for comfort, a yarn that broke when you took it off the bobbin, or yarn that lacks stability when you try to use it in a project.

The fix: Needle felt and then add a little friction felt magic. First, take the 2 ends and twist them around each other, crossing them by approximately 1–2 inches (12–25cm). Hold the newly twisted area (it will be a loose twist around) with 2 fingers. I use my thumb and first finger to hold the 2 broken ends in place. I hold them on top of a needle felt pad and then needle felt with a 36-gauge needle starting in the middle and then moving to one end and then the other. Flip the yarn around regularly, from top to bottom and side to side, repeating the needle felt process. As you work, wrap any stray ends around the yarn and then needle felt in place.

Once the 2 broken ends are joined together, roll the yarn between your hands. I don’t want to give this area a really different look, so I don’t use an actual wet felt process; rather, I use a friction felt by using the natural moisture of my hands and the friction of the rolling action to help further join (tangle) the fibres together.

At this point, I give the section of yarn a little tug to find out if my repair work is holding. If I sense any residual weakness I will continue to both needle and friction felt until the broken ends are joined to my satisfaction.

Overspun or underspun sections

Overspun yarn will be very kinky and twist back on itself tightly without effort on your part. Overspinning singles is used for yarns to be plied, so one of the most common fixes for an overspun yarn is to ply it. However, if I intended to create a singles yarn, I would put the yarn back on my wheel or spindle and work in the opposite direction to that which I spun the yarn in the first place. A slightly overspun yarn or one with sections of overspin can also sometimes be dealt with once skeined during the finishing process while the yarn is still damp. I work the skein by gently snapping small sections of the yarn, gradually working around the entire length. I will repeat this process a number of times in one session and sometimes repeat a session as the yarn dries. Lastly, my favourite way of working with an overspun yarn is to spin it again, either in the opposite direction to release the additional twist (for extremely overspun yarn) or with another yarn to experiment with coiling it onto base yarn or leaving twisty back loops!

Underspun sections in your yarn can show up as puffy areas that look more like the fibre before spinning and can leave weak spots. They can be dealt with by using the weak spot repair technique discussed above. If your entire yarn lacks twist and integrity, you can re-spin the yarn by putting it back on your spindle or wheel and spinning in the direction you spun it. When I re-spin a yarn on my wheel, I work with more brake tension to increase the uptake and reduce the likelihood of creating the opposite problem of an overspun yarn.

Thick and thin

Having uneven width along the yarn strand may be the easiest to work with: knit it or crochet it on a needle or crochet hook that is bigger than standard for the yarn weight. The uneven thick and thin will make lovely net fabric. This may require a bit of experimentation to get the correct size for the nicest look. I start with the ideal tool size for the thickest part of the yarn I am working with and tweak sizing from there. If your thick and thin yarn also has other issues, such as those mentioned above, or you want to knit it into a project where the look or style you would like requires a more even yarn, I would move to plying the yarn as a way to smooth out the worst of the uneven areas. Plying 2 uneven yarns together often works in an uncanny way, creating an unexpected level of evenness. Of course if your yarn has significant width differences, your yarn, plied or not, will still have an uneven texture. If the yarn you would like to ply does not have enough twist after a plyback test, you can re-spin the yarn in the same direction you spun it to begin with, creating enough overspin that the yarn will not be underspun when you ply it. You can also chain ply yarn made of an uneven thickness to create a very interesting rope-like yarn. Another method is to ply your thick and thin yarn with a thread or cord for a bubble or bobble look.

Use them as they are

One of my favourite ways to enjoy my first handspun yarns both of the more traditional vein and those first creative textured yarn attempts has been to embrace them for what they are and to find uses that suit their unique nature. Find some examples below and then use your creativity and curiosity to experiment!

Use yarn that is overspun, thick and thin, or from a scratchy fibre (or all of the above) to crochet or knit into a small cloth, either alone or with another suitable yarn. Use it as an exfoliator or for your dishes. This yarn in finer or softer fibres can make a delightful springy and interesting fabric. Arm knit or use large needles to create a cowl, scarf, or shawl with this living yarn.

Small samples that twist and turn and that are uneven and unique can be used in simple projects without a pattern. Projects that use single or double crochets or stocking or garter knit stitches will be the most straight forward to work shorter lengths of handspun yarn into. Hats, fingerless mitts, and leg warmer patterns, along with shawls, cowls, and sweater edgings are all places you can use small amounts of not quite perfect handspun yarn. By using wraps per inch (WPI) to match the weight of a base yarn, it is straightforward and easy to insert rows of handspun yarn next to a base yarn. A bonus to this approach is that an even millspun or handspun yarn juxtaposed with a textured creative yarn is the perfect way to show off the beauty of both yarns.

Project Looms are a wonderful way to play creatively and to make it up as you go! Project looms are a style of loom in which your project is left in the frame after completion, which means no finishing, easy to hang, and almost no rules! Project looms come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and styles such as stars, circles, rainbows, mountains, clouds, animals, and more! The brilliant aspect of the project loom is that because your project remains in the frame, it matters very little if the yarn you use has weak spots, is overspun or underspun, or is not really a yarn at all! Use the yarn in a plain tabby weave (over one, under one, repeat), make bubbles, create tassels, or simply stuff it into the spaces between the warp. Let your imagination be your guide!

Don’t let imperfection spoil your creative fun, for often that which we perceive as flawed is where true beauty can be found.

Sarah Elizabeth is a Canadian born, classically trained painter and sculptor with a Baccalaureate of Arts from the University of Guelph. Her current focus is in mixed media works with a basis in textiles. Sarah uses traditional and functional handcrafts such as spinning, weaving, macramé, felting, and stitching to inform the basis for her professional works, which are inspired by the breathtaking landscapes of the Kootenays. Sarah is the artist and owner behind Sarah Elizabeth Fibre Works, a destination fibre art supply business based in Rossland, BC, Canada with a focus on ethical, sustainably sourced and produced fibre art supplies and tools for all fibre art enthusiasts including knitting, crochet, weaving, spinning, felting, macramé, stitching, and more.

PLY Magazine believes that Black lives matter, as well as LBGTQI+ lives. Those most vulnerable and persecuted in our communities deserve our love and support. Please be good to each other.

Beth provides PLY’s customer service, so when you write to the contact us email address or call the PLY phone number, Beth is who you’ll reach!

Tell us a little bit about yourself, what fiber craft(s) you do, and how you got started in the fiber world.

Knitting is my “main” fiber art, but I also love quilting, spinning (obviously), needlepoint, and sewing. I also dabble in weaving. Oh, and photography. And drawing and watercolor painting have recently been added in to the mix. It all got started in the Girl Scouts when I earned the Knitting badge. Other than that, I was a pretty terrible scout! I’m not one to blindly follow along with whatever the rest of the crowd is doing, so that was a mismatch from the get-go.

Tell us about how you got started with your role at PLY and what you do for PLY.

My best friend told me about the opening at PLY after she saw it on Facebook, and I still don’t know why she didn’t keep it for herself! She would have been an excellent choice. She’s also the one I blame for getting me into spinning because she raises Finns and I think she just wanted to off-load some of her fleeces! Anyway, I sent in a totally non-traditional email as an application, didn’t include a resumé, and was completely shocked when I made the cut to have an online interview with Jacey, and even more so when she offered me the job!

And I must say that I absolutely love this job! I have had so many customer service and retail jobs where the clients were just so consistently unpleasant, but that has not been the case at all with PLY! Most of my work comes in by email, but I absolutely love it when our readers call. One customer even called from Australia! There are a few readers who keep in touch with an email every now and then, and it absolutely makes my day to know that someone on the other side of the country is thinking about me when we have never met face-to-face. What an honor!

What do you do with your free time?

Free time? Hah! What free time? Have you seen the list of hobbies? My beloved and I also moved to a new home at the end of May. It had been empty for some time and needs a lot of work, so that is currently taking up a bunch of our time. It has been a lot of fun putting our creative energy into faux painting techniques, using stencils for wall decorations, and choosing paint colors. He is orignally from South Korea, so finding a mutually-pleasing aesthetic is proving to be a challenge: he favors a more Zen approach, while I am left drooling over all the super colorful renovations Lucy Neatby has been posting on Instagram!

What else would you like to share about yourself?

We live in Conneticut with my two boys and two frisky kitties (Jacey and I are cat twins!). I fully intend to milk the “my house is a mess because we’re not done unpacking” excuse to avoid housework as long as possible. And I love the fact that I can do my job in pajamas and nobody knows the difference.

Am I a Consistent Spinner and Other Lies I Tell Myself

Consistency is tough. It has been something I have strived for in so many aspects of my life, my spinning being only one small example. As PLY’s customer service representative, I try so hard to provide a consistently high level of assistance to all of our wonderful readers. I try to make my spaghetti sauce taste pretty much the same every time I make it. But my yarn? Oh. My. That is another story.

I try, I really do. Thankfully, being a world-class spinner was not a job requirement. (Thank you, Jacey!) Please bear in mind that I have ADHD, and sometimes I forget to take my meds. For those of you who don’t know what it’s like to live with this type of brain, I refer you to the movie Up. If “Squirrel!” means anything to you, now you get it. If you don’t know the movie, it’s fabulous on so many levels, so you should watch it. Really. Without meds, I see a lot of squirrels on an hourly basis.

For example, I may start out with the intention of spinning a lovely laceweight in an amazing blue fiber that’s a blend of silk and Merino and other lovelies, and I’m fine until “Squirrel!” And my fully focused, mostly even worsted yarn becomes a mostly even-ish woolen yarn a few (hah! several!!) less WPI than what I started with. This is the sad but true story of my spinning life. I console myself by saying that nobody will ever notice once the shawl is knitted up after the singles have been plied. I mean, plying hides a multitude of sins, doesn’t it?

I consistently tell myself that if I concentrate really, really hard, I can make sure the rest of the spinning is 100% worsted so the plying will make up for my encounters with grey rodents. That my whimsy merely shows the “hand” in handmade. Maybe I tell myself that only expert eyes will examine my knitting that closely, and if they do, maybe they need to relax a bit and back off.

At the end of the day, the one consistent thing about my spinning is that I try. Sometimes I actually succeed. For very brief periods of time. The trick is to not let that stop you. You just have to find the “convincing arguments” (some would say “lies”; po-tay-to, po-tah-to) that keep you going. Find them. Use them. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. My personal motto is “It will be fine.” The “it” changes all the time. Sometimes it’s my spinning, sometimes the spaghetti sauce. Either way, I end up with something worth the effort.

PLY Magazine believes that Black lives matter, as well as LBGTQI+ lives. Those most vulnerable and persecuted in our communities deserve our love and support. Please be good to each other.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started spinning.

Basically, I tricked myself into learning to spin. My first fiber love was knitting, and I followed that bliss and focused on learning, making, and teaching for years. Then I picked up weaving, which was like coming home to me, and I became devoted to learning and exploring it deeply. I resisted the siren’s call of spinning for a long time, convinced it would take away from my weaving and add a second learning curve when I really just wanted a singular focus on my weaving.

And then Spinzilla happened. I had just become Weaving Manager at WEBS yarn store and ignored the call for a team captain until it became apparent the spinners were too busy to take it on. I didn’t spin, but I recognize a fun competition when I see it and volunteered, thinking my organizing and cheerleading skills could lead the day. Then, as the event came closer, I realized it would feel weird to be exhorting my teammates to “spin more!” and “faster!” when I wasn’t adding to the team total. So a weaving guildmate taught me to spin, and I made lumpy yarn with much encouragement from my teammates and fell in love both with spinning and the community of spinners.

Of course, spinning lives up to my worst fears: it competes with weaving for my time and money, adds another type of fiber stash to an already packed house, needs more tools – and it soothes my soul and, ironically, has opened a whole new style of weaving to me.

Do you have a favorite type of yarn to spin?

I have a fondness for the sheepy things; I love the sproing and bounce. But then I took a silk spinning workshop last August (2019) and became entranced. I declared 2020 to be the Year of Silk and decided to focus on learning and experimenting and trying new things with silks and silk blends. It feels so indulgent and luxurious to work with, yet it is strong and has that wonderfully long staple.

What do you like to make with your handspun yarn?

For a long time I was definitely a process spinner – my joy was in the time spinning and the finished yarn was an afterthought waiting for a suitable project to show up. In the past couple of years, I’ve come into making intentional yarn, creating the yarn I envision for a project, usually weaving. I’ve been weaving a series of wide scarves on my rigid heddle loom, mixing my handspun with a commercial weaving yarn to create warp-dominant pieces that showcase the handspun. This has been a lot of fun, especially with the silks and silk blends.

My other favorite reason to spin is for gift giving. Many of my friends and family create things from yarn, and I love to surprise them with something special – a luxe blend or amazing colorway. And then I get to indulge myself, too, in the spinning process.

How long have you been reading PLY?

Since I started spinning in 2014. Spinning friends who mentored me raved about it, and I could see why. I fell in love with the simple beauty, the eye candy, and as I learned to spin, I learned more and more from the articles. I have many issues in my bookcase, they are my reference library and resource guides, and a couple that I bought digitally (the Silk issue is pretty much open on my laptop all the time these days).

What do you look forward to most when you get an issue?

An afternoon/evening of relaxation, inspiration, and education! I get myself a beverage and settle into a cozy corner to pore through it. Admire the front cover and see what Jacey has to say, scan the contents and see if anything jumps out, and then begin a long perusal. Sometimes it’s a brief once-through with an eye to coming back to certain things. Other times, when I have the time, I devour the articles as I go. After it lolls around the house for a few weeks, it goes on the shelf with the others, ready to refer to for guidance or inspiration. They feel pretty timeless to me.

Tell us about a project you worked on that was inspired by an article, project, or issue of PLY.

Since I have been raving about silk, you can guess that my favorite issue of PLY is the Silk one. Once I took the silk spinning class, I bought the issue digitally and consumed it, rereading articles several times. I wanted to learn more about different kinds of silk, and 2 of the articles got my interest. The first was an experiment with multiple types of silk comparing luster and direction of spin/ply which seemed like a great way to try the different types of silk. The second was a project to make what the author called a deconstructed cowl. It was colorful and playful and involved an assortment of fiber preps, so here was another great way to learn about the varieties of silk. When I declared 2020 the Year of Silk, I got ready for it by seeking out and buying all the soft and shiny bits for these 2 projects.

When the pandemic came along I thought spinning would be my salvation, relaxing and calming me as usual. But when I tried my default yarn, the mindless kind I thought would be soothing with its regularity, my mind just raced with anxious thoughts. I realized I needed something to help me focus my mind, which learning some new will do, but I didn’t want to add stress; I needed something fun. Immediately I thought of the deconstructed cowl, and here is how it went:

I had some of the supplies already and then bought the rest to go (nominally) colorwise with them. I looked for the brightest, most cheerful colors I could find. I filled my basket with bombyx brick, hand painted bombyx combed top, hankies, cocoons, sari waste, and more random bombyx top. I set the basket next to me while I was spinning the single and chose randomly what to spin next.

This part of the project was so delightful! I put no pressure on myself to make perfect yarn, and since the project was a bit wacky, it was all going to look crazy anyway. At the same time, I was focused on learning to work with the fibers, so my mind was occupied with what was in my hands rather than what was in the world. This spinning was definitely my happy place: the colors were fun, I got to keep changing it up, there was no wrong way, and – the shiny!

I spun the top and the brick over the fold with a short forward draw and the sari silk with a short forward draw; the hankies I drafted out and just added twist at the wheel (Lendrum double treadle with jumbo plyer).

The second step involved coiling the single around a core (I used 10/2 cotton, a weaving yarn). I had never done coils before and certainly never saw myself spinning an art yarn (how did I get here?), but the pictures in the article were so clear and precise that it was easy to pick up. To be honest, I’m not sure I got it right, but the end result works; it looks like success to me. The coiling was fun, too, kind of like holding the reins on a cantering horse. Of course, that would be a carousel horse because it was so brightly colored, and then there were these cocoons dangling like little bobbles! I posted pictures to my spinning group, and a friend dubbed it Seuss-like, a comparison I love.

I did change things up when I had a break in my coiled yarn which allowed me to do the plying from 2 separate bobbins rather than trying to wind a plying ball, which sounded tricky. Of course the bobbins weren’t even, but I realized the leftover coiled yarn makes a perfect necklace.

The last step was to crochet this twisted and plied colorful cord. I wound the plied yarn onto my swift and worked from the swift to crochet what I now call the Seussian Silk Garland. It is heavy and shiny and has these dangly colorful cocoons. I wish I were living in my parents’ house with their big bay window because that would be the perfect place to hang this garland, as a swag that would sparkle and shine in the sun. For now, I have my garland draped around the walls of my bedroom, very renaissance in a Seussian way. It will be my goofy garland of the pandemic, a symbol of joy and learning shining through.

Epilogue: I have started my second PLY pandemic project, the study of spin/ply twist direction on luster. I am proceeding slowly, as I apparently need breaks for wild color, but I’m learning a lot as I work through the different varieties of silk.

Leslie Ann Bestor can be found on Ravlery as carpeyarnum and Instagram @leslieannbestor.

If you’d like to participate in an upcoming reader feature, fill out the reader feature form and Karen will contact you.

PLY Magazine believes that Black lives matter, as well as LBGTQI+ lives. Those most vulnerable and persecuted in our communities deserve our love and support. Please be good to each other.

Ads are officially on sale for the next issue on Double coated and primitive (Spring 2021).

We are dedicated to keeping this magazine content heavy and ad light (ads are only 12–15% of our content). Hopefully you’ve noticed this, and hopefully you’ve noticed the ads. We love our advertisers – without them, we couldn’t bring you this magazine. So if you’ve got a spinning-related business, consider advertising! We’ve got a limited number of spaces available at a variety of sizes/aspects and affordable prices.

Art due December 1, with the issue shipped March 10, 2021.

Check out all the details about ads here.

PLY Magazine believes that Black lives matter, as well as LBGTQI+ lives. Those most vulnerable and persecuted in our communities deserve our love and support. Please be good to each other.