Fiber Fool

Before I could spin up the lovely batts from Friday’s post I needed to pull some yarn off the wheel. This is 260 yds of handspun singles of roughly the same size as went into the bulky 2-ply handpsun that I used to knit Urchin. I still need to spin another skein and together they will someday become thrummed mittens to go with Urchin. I love how the singles fabric contrasts with the 2-ply such that things knit from the different yarns will match without being too matchy. This was however spun up in Nov/Dec sometime shortly after completing Urchin.

I also wanted to reacquiant myself with bulky spinning before working with the gorgeous Terrabellaspun batts. My default singles are definitely laceweight so I knew a warm up of spinning some bulky 2-ply would be a good move. I fortunately had some batts I had ordered some time ago lying around with no real purpose. It was about 3 ounces of a wool alpaca blend if I recall correctly.

The yarn is okay. Not great, but it did serve as a good warm up. I was not terribly pleased with these warm up batts. It seemed as though the maker was in a big hurry when they were made and the fiber not fed onto the drum slowly enough or evenly. I ended up with huge blobs of fiber and then hardly anything and the blobs just wouldn’t draft, not even during pre-drafting. I think it wouldn’t have been quite so problematic for a less bulky yarn as you could have pre-drafted more and thus been able to draft out those blobs a bit more, but it really didn’t suit bulky spinning.

This made me sad, as batts are one of the most luscious ways to get bulky yarn because they already have a ton of loft in them. This means you can get really decent yardage for little weight when you ply it and it opens back up all those fibers you compressed in the singles. It’s amazing! I didn’t record details on this handspun, but if I recall correctly the singles WPI was near 14, but the plyed yarn is only ~3-4 WPI! And, of course trapping all the air into the handspun makes it not only softer and loftier, but also a better insulator!

Needless to say I was more than a little disappointed in these batts. Generally I buy the fun batts from Etsy with the idea of spinning at least a worsted, if not a bulky yarn. I’ve heard reports of this seller’s other batts and all have been glowing so I think I’ll chalk this set up as not her usual quality. Given that, I won’t divulge whom I purchased them from. I’m still unsure whether I’ll order from that seller again or not. It would take a spectacular blend I think to get me to do so. There are so many different options (though why does almost everything include glitz/angelina/firestar????).

If you *really* want to know who the seller was, I posted about the batts on here when I first got them so you could figure it out if you want to fish through the archives.