For those of you who have tried the Socks that Rock® yarn from Blue Moon Fiber Arts®, you know how wonderful it is – fabulous colorways in a beautiful, squishy yarn. Well, because I wanted to see what it would take to spin a yarn like that, I bought their “Sheep 2 Shoe” kit a few weeks ago when they were having their year end sale. It came in the mail yesterday, and here’s what it looks like.

It’s 8.5 oz of superwash merino in the ‘Alina’ colorway. It reminds me of a tie-dyed t-shirt from the 60s!

The instructions that come with the fiber tell you to divide the fiber lengthwise into three continuous strips. The goal – if you want your yarn to turn out like the Socks that Rock yarn – is to spin three fine singles, about 22-24 wraps per inch using a worsted method, and then ply them together.

I don’t usually try to hit a particular wpi when I spin, but I’m going to this time. It should be a fun challenge. I’ll let you know how it turns out!

The Spinner’s Study group on Ravelry (login required) is a relatively new group that was started with the idea of helping each learn about different fibers and techniques. What the group has decided to do is to pick two different fibers each month and have the members post about how they are preparing and spinning the fiber. For this month (the group’s first), the fibers selected were Cotswold and Jacob.

At first I was thinking I’d be ambitious and try to spin a bit of both, and then reality hit me and I decided that I really only had the time and energy to focus on one of them, so I chose the Cotswold. Above is a picture of the beautiful Cotswold roving I bought from Morro Fleece Works for the study.

This is a picture of what I’ve done so far – I’ve spun and plied a bit of it, but have not set the twist. I’ve been spinning the fiber using the long draw method and am making it into a two-ply yarn. I think it’s about the equivalent of a light worsted weight although I have not checked its wraps per inch yet.


A lot of the Spinner’s Study group participants seem to be more ambitious than I was feeling this month, and chose to buy raw wool fleece to prepare and spin. There are couple of interesting threads going on about both the fiber preparation and the spinning – if you’re interested in learning more about either Cotswold or Jacob wool and are a Ravelry member, you should check out the group discussion.

In my earlier post on spinning hemp, I showed you my initial progress on spinning singles using a wet spinning method. Now I’ve finished making the yarn and wanted to show you the results.

As you can see, I didn’t do anything fancy here – I just made a standard a two-ply fingering weight yarn, which I’m planning to use for one of the scarf projects in Lisa Lloyd’s new book, A Fine Fleece. However, I’m probably going to end up modifying the pattern slightly to make a thinner scarf, because I don’t have as much yardage as the pattern calls for.

The plying went really fast. Because I only had about a bobbin and a half worth of singles, I took the full bobbin and the partial bobbin, put them on my lazy kate, and plied them from there. Once the partial bobbin was out of yarn, I made a skein out of the resulting two-ply yarn.

Next I took the bobbin that had some yarn remaining and made a center-pull yarn with my nostepinne. Sometimes when I get to this point I’ll just ply directly, grabbing one end from the center and one from the outside, but because I think I overspun the singles slightly, I thought that I might end up with a tangled mess if I did it that way. So instead, I used a method I think I first heard about from this thread on Ravelry (login reqired) – I took both ends together and re-rolled the yarn into a standard, outside-pull ball, which gave me a double-stranded length of yarn that was ready to ply.

After plying that, I took both skeins and boiled them for half an hour on my stove to set the twist. After the skeins cooled, I rolled them in a towel to take out as much water as I could, then I hung them to dry with a hanger hanging from the bottom to weight them slightly.

Although this is a far from perfect yarn, overall I’m pretty pleased considering that it was my first attempt to spin hemp. If anyone has any additional tips about spinning hemp or other bast fibers, I’d love to hear them!

When choosing a raw wool fleece or other type of animal fiber, one of the things you’ll want to know before you purchase is how soft the fleece is. As anyone who has ever worn a scratchy wool sweater knows, the softness or fineness of a fiber should probably be the #1 consideration if you’re planning to use the yarn you spin for a next to the skin project.

If you are buying your fiber online or by phone, you are at somewhat of a disadvantage when making your choice, since you don’t have the opportunity to put your hands on it and see what it feels like! Fortunately for us, there are some fairly objective measures of a fiber’s fineness. The two you’ll see most frequently are Bradford count (also known as English spinning count) and micron count.

Bradford count is the less objective of these two types of measurement systems. The Bradford system measures the fineness of a fiber by determining the maximum number of 560 yard skeins that can be spun from one pound of combed fiber. So under the Bradford count system, a higher count translates into a finer fleece.

Micron count is a bit more scientific of a measurement. One micron is equal to 1/1000 of a millimeter. This means that if the micron count is being used as the system of measurement, a lower number means a finer fleece. So you can see that it’s important to know if someone is referring to the micron count or the Bradford count when they are describing a fleece.

It’s all well and good to know the definitions of Bradford count and micron count – but you may still be wondering how this translates into how a fleece actually feels to the touch. This might give you some idea:

• Merino wool, which is among the softest breeds of sheep’s wool, generally has a Bradford count of approximately 60-70, and a micron count of about 24-18.
• Blue-faced Leicester, another breed of sheep whose wool is prized by spinners, has a Bradford count of about 56-60, and a micron count of 28-24.
• Navajo-Churro wool is generally on the opposite side of the scale from Merino, with the Bradford count of its outer coat of around 38 and a micron count of approximately 36.
• Alpaca wool, which is well-known for its softness, has a micron count of 27-19.

Now, if you absorbed what I’ve said above, you may have noticed that the micron count of alpaca fiber is comparable to that of merino wool. However, if you’ve felt both fibers yourself, you probably noticed that alpaca feels much softer to the touch, and might be wondering why.

This is where things get slightly more complicated. Although the micron count of alpaca fiber is similar to that of merino, it will generally feel softer because the height of the scales on alpaca fiber is about half that of wool.

If you’d like to learn more about the characteristics of sheep’s wool, I would recommend that you visit Oklahoma State’s web site on sheep breeds, or that you pick up Nola Fournier’s wonderful book on the subject, In Sheep’s Clothing: A Handspinner’s Guide to Wool.

I’ve got a couple of spinning projects going at the moment – the one I’m going to focus on today is the hemp I’m spinning. I bought this hemp recently from Morro Fleece Works and I’m spinning it on my Schacht Matchless spinning wheel. I’ll confess right now that I didn’t really know how to deal with this fiber when I started, but I was inspired to try spinning it because it’s the fiber that was chosen this month for the Garden Spinning Ravelry group‘s monthly spin-along.

There doesn’t seem to be all that much detailed information on the web about spinning hemp, although I did find this article from Knitty.com by PippiKneeSocks. Even though she focuses on spinning a hemp/recycled sari silk blend in the article, she had plenty of good tips in there to get me started. She suggests:

• Spinning it fine, with your wheel set at a higher ratio, which I liked to see because it was my first instinct.
• Wet spinning it, much like you would with flax. I’m doing this by keeping a cup of water next to my wheel, and dipping my hand into it occasionally.
• Setting the twist in boiling water instead of soapy hot water like you would for wool.

I’ve only spun a bit so far, but here are the results.

I’m finding this a little more challenging to spin than some other fibers I’ve tried, but not unmanageable. The texture is a little rough as you can see from the photo, and some pieces of fiber seem to want to escape from the roving occasionally, but it’s not too bad. There are a few tougher pieces in the roving that I’ve been picking out as I go so they don’t create lumps in my yarn, but I’d say this is a pretty good quality roving.

Have you spun hemp before? What tips do you have to share?

When you first become interested in the fiber arts, especially in spinning, you can quickly become overwhelmed by all the terms people throw around. While this post won’t attempt to completely cover all the terminology involved, I’ll take a stab here at something a lot of beginning spinners ask – what’s the difference between various fiber preparations – roving, top, etc.?

But first, I’ll mention two broad categories of prepared fiber – carded fiber vs. combed fiber.

The combing process aligns fiber in a parallel fashion and removes the shorter bits. You should use combed fiber when you want to make a true worsted yarn. In contrast, the carding process retains both the longer and shorter fibers together, and aligns the fibers somewhat, but in a less parallel, more jumbled fashion than you’ll find in a combed preparation. Carded fiber is used to make a woolen yarn, and is also often used for needle felting or wet felting. Woolen yarn is fluffier and has trapped air in it, which will result in a warmer finished garment. Worsted yarn is smoother, more dense, and more lustrous.

A batt is a carded fiber preparation made with a drum carder. It is basically a sheet or rectangular mass of carded fiber.

A roving is a batt that has been sectioned or drawn out into a long strand of overlapping fibers, and has had a little bit of twist added to it.

Pencil roving is like regular roving, but is thinner.

A sliver (pronounced with a long “EYE” sound, not like something you might get in your finger), is similar to a roving, but doesn’t have any added twist.

Pin-drafted roving is a roving on which a pin-drafting machine has been used to further align the fiber and make the preparation more even, but not as even or parallel as you’d get in a combed preparation.

A rolag is a hand-carded fiber preparation. Once the fiber is carded on the hand cards, it is taken off and rolled up kind of link a fruit rollup.

Top is fiber that has been combed and pulled out into a long strands.

And finally, a quick word of advice. Although the technically correct term for a long strand of combed fiber is a “top” and the correct term for a long strand of carded fiber is a “roving”, many people – even people who are selling you the fiber – often use the terms interchangeably. So, if you are set on making either a true worsted or true woolen yarn, make sure you double-check to find out if the fiber has been combed or carded before purchasing!