There! I've been wanting to post that pic for weeks now. Two remarkably different yarns that I just happened to skein and wash at the same time...I always knew that the way one spins a yarn is crucial to deciding its appearance and behavior, but these yarns really brought that home.

The one on the left is Corriedale, fairly short fibers at that, that I ran through my drum carder, pulled off as a roving, and then spun with a short forward draw with no smoothing. Quite a mix of techniques there, but as you can see, the resulting yarn is still quite lofty and fluffy. It was spun to be thicker than the other yarn, so the loft doesn't account for the difference in thickness, but believe me, it's fluffier, bouncier, and takes up more room. When I plied it, the bobbins could only hold about 3 ounces of it, not the usual 4+. (Speaking of which, I can't wait to get the Fricke plying head, which should make splitting up plied yarns onto different bobbins no longer necessary.) When I pulled it up out of the soak water, the water poured off it in a rush, leaving it almost dry to the touch.

The one on the right is the Cormo x Romney, of course, a long-stapled fiber that was hand-combed and spun true worsted. It's dense, and when I pulled it out of the water, I had to gently squeeze the water out--it didn't shed the water like the Corrie yarn.



As mentioned in a recent post about libraries, I requested a book on "Penguin Quill" spinning from our state's academic library network. I could have Googled "Penguin Quill" to see what it meant, but reckoned I would wait for the book. Well, apparently it was a wheel type invented in the late 60s/early 70s, an upright wheel with a quill head. Looks like a decent enough invention, although not something I'll be picking up for myself. Although I do not plan to get a Penguin Quill wheel (antiques are out there, and a few people still make them), I read the little booklet from cover to cover. It had that good-natured naivete that a lot of 70s books on spinning seem to have, with hand-drawn illustrations, rustic techniques, and a willingness to experiment. An interesting suggestion, for instance, was to rough-card damp fiber with dry fiber and spin them together to make a "gloppy" thick and thin yarn. Again, this is not something I'm likely to try, but the results of the author's experiment did not look half bad.

I took a picture or two of the book's pages because the illustrations were very much "vintage" to me, and reminded me of some of the old spinning books I stumbled across at libraries, when I was first learning. The last page of the booklet, above, struck me as especially poignant--all those pals, caught in time (40 years ago!), making stuff and hanging out together, with the funny, charming end-note spelled out in yarn. They really don't make spinning books like this anymore.