Analyse This

Saturday's spinning workshop at the Guild was another take on novelty yarns. We spent the morning analysing and re-creating a commercial yarn. It was fascinating. What initially appeared to be a fairly ordinary slubby yarn with a bit of contrast, turned out to consist of three strands, each involving special techniques. After pulling our sample to pieces, analysing the structure and fibre content of each component, we put together our own version.

Here's what we came up with:

• slubby cotton wrapped around a core
• mohair boucle
• silver lurex bullion

. . . no that's not three yarns: all those techniques went into the one. We worked in pairs for this exercise. M and I chose white/neutrals and with a silver touch. M and M, the other team, worked in strong pinks and greens. With exactly the same basic structure, the effect was very different. I'd like to repeat the exercise on a few more commercial yarns and see what I can learn. On the other hand, spinning by hand does have some different constraints . . . and all those special techniques are intensely time consuming. Still, it's always good to extend and learn some more.