I’m finally getting the hang of my drop spindle. I do most of my knitting with lace and fingering weight yarns, so the larger weights look funny to me. I’m also a tiny bit compulsive about wanting things to look uniform. So the drop spindle had been driving me crazy – the yarn was too think, bunched up funny, and in the few places where it was thin tended to kink itself up.
But last night I had a breakthrough. I took much, much shorter sections of fibre – between 8 and 12 inches long – and I separated it into very thin segments and then pulled those out even a bit further. It’s coming out as a roughly 1ply fingering weight, which I’m okay with. And more uniform since it’s easier to judge how ‘thick’ the fibre should be in that amount. I don’t mind having to graft two pieces together more often. Plus, I’m getting rid of the think portions that aren’t really twisted at all.
Yay!