Never before have I used one, but I found a nice palette generator to help me begin my first weaving project, and I must say, these tools are awesome! I have needed to go to the source of my inspiration, which is the landscape around me, and to simply draw from the pool of photos in the archives in my blog will give me the colors I need, for knitting, weaving, anything. This photo Golden Fields which inspired a knitted lace design, again it will with weaving. For my first attempt with this palette, I am sampling the wool on the inkle loom . . .
The colors are all there, and what an interesting plain weave from the four colors in my yarn drawer, even though they may not be exactly as the color generator produced. It was just a matter of reconstructing the yarns from fluffy worsted knitting yarn into very tightly plied laceweight weaving yarn, like the Andean weavers do with wool, leave it to me to be a yarn nerd about it. My first try at making fine dense weaving wool (about 24 wpi) is nowhere near as fine as the authentic Peruvian pieces I have, but I think perhaps a very good starter weaving weight.
Okay spinners, here is how I do it . . .
- In z twist direction, I wind worsted weight on to bobbin without giving much twist, just tighten the tension on the bobbin, and let the yarn fly on to the bobbin, and it will become unplied somewhat, needing touch-up in next step, but I do NOT want to over twist (unply) or I’ll be having to reverse direction in the next step at intervals.
- Then with untwisted plied yarn on a bobbin, I loosen the bobbin tension so that I can pull the yarn back off, dividing the 4 plies and wind into two balls of 2ply, while at the same time spinning slowly as needed in z twist direction, when the twist builds up again.
- Once two balls of 2ply yarn needing to be respun with s twist, I wet spin in s twist direction to ply, while keeping tension on the yarn winding on to the bobbin so it is tightly plied and firmly wound on to bobbin. I find that wetting my finger tips helps manage fluff and also more densely plies the yarn.
- After finished, still damp, I wind finished plied yarn on to a felted wool ball somewhat firmly, as to keep a bit of tension on the yarn while drying. This is what the Peruvians do for their weaving handspun yarns, I learned from instructional video Andean Spinning by Nilda Callañaupa Álvarez, winding around often a little pebble to start their balls. I am using her technique as my guidance, and although I can’t imagine why they would want their yarn tightly wound, (so against the principles of knitting yarn) I am guessing it is so the wool’s elasticity on the warp is lessoned.
