The Single Life

I'm referring here, of course, to spinning singles. Singles are yarns that have only one ply -- a single ply -- rather than being two- or three- or more ply yarns. The knitting worsted yarns that most of us grew up with were four-ply. Mostly in my spinning career I've been spinning two-ply yarns. Plying two singles together releases some of the overtwist that is inherent in singles, and it also makes a stronger yarn.

Two weeks ago during the spinning class I gave, I spun several single ply samples of fibers that I really like to use. After spinning, the samples were soaked in hot water, squeezed out, and hung to dry with some weight on them. And I'm quite happy with the way they turned out, so I think I'm going to focus more on spinning singles and weaving with those. It also takes half as long to spin singles as two-ply yarns, obviously!

The samples above, from the left, are bamboo, merino/tencel, merino/tussah silk, and tencel.

Last week I took a bit of time off from weaving to focus on some art business matters. Now I'm warping the loom again for another silk scarf of hand dyed, handspun silk, and I'm using a luscious variegated grape bombyx very fine two-ply yarn I made about a year ago. I'll upload a photo as soon as I can.