Dyet Yarns: reuse, recycle, reinvent!

After spinning some nice, fine merino on my spindle, I had two long bobbins of tiny singles. I started plying the two of them together as a 2-ply, and the yarn was just SO TINY that I decided I needed another method. I wanted a nice, smooshy yarn, so I decided to try making a 6-ply yarn by double Navajo plying it.

Navajo plying is basically making a long crochet chain with your singles and then letting the twist run up your chain. Generally you do a very large loop and hold the tail together with the loop for a 3-ply yarn. When the twist gets almost up to the top of the loop, you pull the tail through to make another big loop.

On a spindle, I find the park and spin method to be the easiest, since the plying takes two hands to set up. I set up my loop to be as long as I can while still holding the spindle off the floor. Then I pull a little bit of the tail through the top of the loop to make a tiny starter loop for the next one. Holding the top of the big loop together with my starter loop, I then twist the spindle and let it twist until it stops on its own (the works for a bulky yarn because the yarn has enough resistance to stop the spindle when it’s balanced. Smaller yarns you will have to watch so they don’t overtwist.) Then I roll up the plied yarn, park the spindle, and pull the starter loop into a new big loop. Repeat until all of your singles are gone! I can put up a photo tutorial on this next time I ply. Most of the videos of N-plying online are for a spinning wheel, but it’s the same idea.

Basically, I Navajo-plied both singles together at the same time. The result is a very bulky yarn that is super soft and squishy. I’m hoping I have enough to make a little hat out of; I might combine it with something else to get a full project out of it. Anyway, here is the TARDIS-colored result of my 3rd effort at handspinning yarn:

Pretty!

(PS, don’t forget to enter the Giveaway this week!)

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.