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 (click here for a review). 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!
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