January 2017 // Fast Forward

30 January, 2017
Posted by Rachel Smith

January has passed in a bit of a whirlwind – I’m sure you will agree! Where did this month go? And in the midst of the chaos that is a new year, I have been spinning away on January’s club but it has been taking forever. The moments to spin have been few and far between, which has not been advantageous to get a fine, 3-ply sock yarn done! I briefly thought about pushing through and spinning up the other half of this month’s braid. In the end though, I decided to stick with quality and consistency, which takes longer to achieve! I’m looking forward to delving into the next half of this braid sometime in the coming weeks because while the yarn was labour-intensive, the results are incredible!

Copyright Rachel Smith / SweetGeorgia Yarns

I decided to split the braid once horizontally to create two halves to spin. With the one half, I set it aside. The other half, I divided vertically 18 times. Yup! 18 times. It was intense and broke a few times but the result is exactly what I was hoping: A highly variegated chain-plied yarn. There are many places that the yarn is barber-poled from multiple colours twisting together. It is a wonderful effect, particularly with the white in the original fibre. I absolutely love white in hand-dyed braids of fibre because of the softening of the bordering colours that happens when drafting.

I spun on my high speed whorl at 22:1 and plied. The result is a sproingy, bouncy yarn with a twist angle of about 55 degrees. This is my favourite for sock yarn, which is my plan for this yarn. I plan to spin the other half of the braid soon but whether I do the same thing with it, I’m not sure! I’m thinking about a 3-ply fractal to create intentionally mis-matching socks. My finished yardage of this yarn was 200 yards out of 50 grams. Not bad and certainly enough for one sock.

As many of you who read this blog regularly knows, Katrina has been knitting and sharing the sock club with you throughout the latter half of 2016. This month, I am pleased to announce that she will be sharing the spinning of club with me going forward! We both love to spin and thought sharing this really fun ‘job’ would help each of us continue to enjoy club but alleviate a little of the pressure each month. It also means that for the first time in over a year, I get to stash some of the club and save it to spin later! The colours of this month’s club and the possibilities meant this was a great month to spin it differently and share it with you. Without further ado, here is Katrina’s take on club this month:

One of my highlights of 2016 was knitting up sock club each month. It was a lot of fun and I hope you all enjoyed my posts. However, close to the end of the year, I was starting to feel overwhelmed by it all and I decided to take a step back from knitting club. I’ve always found that when one door closes another one opens and I’m very excited to be teaming up with Rachel this year and changing things up a little. We’re looking forward to sharing the spinning of club each month and this month, with the broad spinning recommendations of spinning what spoke to you, we thought it was a perfect opportunity to each spin the fibre differently. To give you two different perspectives and introduce the change!

When I laid out this month’s braid, I was struck by the opposites of it. The warm tones on one side and the cool tones on the other.

Copyright Katrina Stewart / SweetGeorgia Yarns

In that moment, I was inspired to spin them just like that… opposites! So I broke the braid apart in the middle of the white.

I spun all the blue chunks to one bobbin, and all the pink to another. I was spinning at about 24 wpi, so that I would have a worsted/aran weight yarn at the end.

Then I plyed them together and got a lovely barber poled yarn that is soft and fluffy.

I had about 10 grams more of the blue tones than the pink tones, so when I reached the end of the pinks, I plied the remaining blue back on itself. In total I have about 130 yards of two ply Aran weight that is destined to become a hat or mitts for one of my girls. I’m looking forward to seeing how this knits up!

Have you delved into January’s club yet? How are you spinning it? Please share over on the Ravelry group or Instagram, and tag your projects with #sgyclub and #sweetgeorgiayarns.

Until next month – Happy spinning!