Plied

I couldn't wait to get these plied!  They look just like I wanted them to look! 

The only hard thing about it was that the plies broke more often than I wanted them to, but I don't think it will be too big of a problem.  I can work around what yarn I do have.  I just tied the plies back together and kept on going.  When I do the warp board, I can cut out the parts that have knots and also when I'm weaving, if there are too many knots in the weft, I can make it work by cutting it and starting over again.  I don't think it will happen too often though... it just felt as though the breaks happened more often than I wanted it to while I was plying them!

Now all I need to do is make some navy in 2-ply and 3-ply, and I should be good to go!  I might just do 3-ply navy... but something tells me that I might want the 2-ply to even things out a bit.

Dissection

I think I finally have dissected enough yarn to ply some together to make the colorful yarn for my cousin's scarf.  I need to turn half of this into a 3-ply with all the colors and the other half needs to be a 2-ply green and pink.

After that, I think I might need to change the navy to corresponding sizes of 2-ply and 3-ply also.  Taking the yarn apart and putting ti back together really isn't entirely all that difficult, although sometimes it does tangle a little bit... mostly I am enjoying the challenge of this project!

Take it apart just to put it together

I am happy to announce that I have officially taken apart and re-spun enough green acrylic yarn to fill one bobbin on my spinning wheel!  Now I just need to do this amount for the mauve, and about half of this for the cream.  Then it's onward to the navy!  I have no idea how much yarn I will need to dissect and re-assemble, but maybe there will be extra to make a 2nd scarf...

My Cousin's Hat-matching Scarf update

Remember the woven hat with the hounds tooth that I'm trying to match for my cousin and weave her a scarf?  She picked out some much better colors AND dropped them off when she visited last month!  So, I decided to do a sample and it's looking really good...  Now, keep in mind this is the project where I have to dissect the yarn into individual plies, spin it a little bit, and then put it all back together again!  :-)  And it's working!!

I noticed in the hat that the warp will need to be one of the combinations and the weft will be the other one. As for the navy blue yarn, I'm not sure how I want to work it.  I can't leave it as 4-ply, but should I mix it's size, also?  Maybe some 3-ply going one way and some 2-ply going the other?  Maybe make the amount of plies opposite of the colorful ones to balance it better?  Or make it all 2 or 3-ply yarn, throughout the whole thing?  I think the idea I like the best is to make it the same size as the warp, and then a different size that is the same size as the weft.  For example, if I use 2-ply pink and green in the warp, I will use 2-ply navy also in the warp.  And then that means the 3-ply pink, green, and cream will be the weft, so I use 3-ply navy for the weft.

I'm not sure yet...  it's all one really huge experiment!

More on the super challenge

I decided to put my challenge more to the test than just a little sample.  I mean, if I'm going to make a commitment to undo enough yarn and re-spin it for a whole scarf, I needed to make sure my plan really worked.

My first method didn't work.  It was trying to pull large amounts of yarn out of a center-pull ball and take it apart.  There was too much energy in the yarn and it just didn't want to come off the ball really easily.  My second idea was to take segments and then when I am spinning, re-attach them back together.  So I took about 1 yard segments apart and spun them back together as singles.  Then I took 3 singles and plied them together.

Here are my original balls of yarn:

 

The center ball was something I wanted to try and stretch further anyway, so this was a good choice to try my new ideas on.  Also, I wanted to see what this looked like with a faded yarn.

I cut sections about a yard long, and each was a 4-ply yarn, so I re-spun each as singles, but there were 3 singles about 4 yards long.  Then, I spun each of them together as a 3-ply yarn:

This is 2-ply, because it was the tail end and I ran out of the pink:

Kind of neat, eh?!  It makes the super colorful yarn a little more toned down, and brings in more solid colors.  I wonder what this would look like all woven up!  I also wonder if it looks or feels different, or if you can see a difference in the plies if you look close.  I also wonder how it mixes with the original commercially done yarns.

It really does open up some doors though!  It's a little bit of extra work, but if you don't have the right shade or size, you could potentially change that!

A super special request and challenge

My cousin in New Mexico has a woven hat that needs a matching scarf.  This is the picture she sent:

She wants me to weave a scarf that is a close match.  Now I could take the easy way out and just pick out one color to match with navy, but that's just not my style!  No, I'm a take-it-to-the-limit kind of person!!

I thought about this carefully for a few days.  I thought about dying my own wool, but that makes it wool and I kind of lose the challenge of it being polyester.  So then I thought about ways I could weave with 3 or 4 strands of yarn that it just wouldn't make this kind of weave.  I really wanted to be able to match the original yarn of 3-ply pink, green, and cream and weaving with 3-4 colors wouldn't solve that problem.  Finally, I turned to my last resort: Dissecting already existing polyester yarn and re-spinning it together!  And it works!

Here is my trial run with very short pieces of colors that have nothing to do with these!

I'm pretty sure if I were to weave this together combined with another color, it would look like the above picture!  I'm terribly excited and I can't wait to try an even bigger amount of yarn!  I told her that if anything, I could make a very close "cousin" to her hat!

Here's what it looks like as 2-ply:

This is really cool!  I feel like I've hit upon a really cool new thing!  I see lots of visions... like I have very little of some ombre yarns that I liked... what if I mixed them with something else to not only tone them down but also stretch them further?!  :-)