[Work in progress, updating on Wednesdays until all spinning/ plying/ hanking is completed. Maybe ending with knit swatches.]
Material and Source Notes
Vendor: Hummingbird Moon
Location: Boulder, Colorado
Fiber: 100% USA Superwash Targhee Wool
Processing: Cleaned, dyed (modern), combed
Weight: 4 oz
Colorway: Bubbling Brew
Care: Will Not Felt. Wash cool water, air dry.
 |
| Cute tag! |
I bought this wool for the color, and for the change in scenery from working with raw wool. Before buying this roving, I knew that I don't entirely love Targhee (I'm pretty spoiled on Merino and Corriedale these days). But I also think it's important to keep up skillsets.
So! Working with something new! I'm pretty happy here.
 |
In the box, all stretched out and draped back in. It's got a nice tie-dye effect.
|
Surveying the Materials
In the interest of being as photograph-friendly as possible, I'm going to be a bit formal with this project. I'll try to note where I usually deviate from what I'll do this time.
Rovings usually store/ship in a dense daisy-chain because this treatment minimizes tangling and makes it easy to attach a tag.
 |
| Chained like this, you can still see the colors of the whole - which is good for identification in storage. |
To start this project, I unchained the roving and laid it flat, to show what I'm working with in terms of color and length.
 |
| I initially laid this out doubled like this for the sake of getting it all into one shot. Conveniently, this also shows the colors lined up. |
I'm seeing a few things in this photo:
- Dead center has the most white on all four "strands."
- The left end (two ends, one fold) is in shadow, but also it doesn't have much white.
- Right end (two folds) also doesn't have much white.
- (roughly) 160 inches total = 13 1/3 feet = 4 4/9 yards (yeah, I looked up that fraction)
After thinking about it a little bit, I also took a photo of how the roving was probably arranged (give or take) while dyeing. This looks plausible to me - it explains the dense white spot, and the rest of the color streaks line up just so nicely.
 |
| If you're having trouble seeing what I'm seeing, look at the bright pink dye line in the middle of the photo. Imagine that I got it lined-up straight, and you should see the other colors also line up. |
All the pretty yarn this will make! Let's get to it!
Preparing the Roving
It's not strictly difficult to spin directly from a thick roving like this, but the work is considerably easier (and less frustrating, and more color-consistent over the length of the yarn) with some quick prep.
Disclaimer: There are whole tutorials and opinion pieces on roving prep and handling at KnitPicks (and elsewhere). I'm less trying to teach a how-to and more showing off a fun thing I like to do.
In my usual practice, I tend to not be terribly concerned about range of colors over the length of spinning - I'm a "journey" (not "destination") kind of spinner. For the sake of this exact iteration, I want to have the prettiest outcome, and I think working this way will do that.
Prepping to Preserve the Color
For the sake of showing best practices, I'll start with an actual stated goal: I want all resulting yarn hanks to end up looking about the same as each other.
How do we do that?
Did you see how the color shifts over the four lengths? I think it'll be sanest to start by breaking the roving at the three fold points, giving me 4 separate lengths that all (roughly) match for colorwork.
 |
| On this roving, the loose ends and three fold points all have this teal in common. |
We should probably take a minute to talk about staple (hair) length. Many processed wool rovings have a staple about 5 inches long. (Rovings/ sheep breeds/ fiber processing all vary. Maybe I'll get into this in the actual spinning section.)
What that means to you is, you need to hold your hands further than that distance, for the fibers to slide across each other (ideal) instead of snapping and breaking while you work (not the best). For this exact step, it's enough to grab at the outside ends of the color section that I want (teal), and pull gently along the length of the roving. The roving stretches and then pops apart.
Now I have four sections of thick roving. An easy way to manage that bulk is to split them down the middle.
But before we get to that step:
I highly recommend working with one section at a time. The more you handle roving, the more likely it is to felt, mat, stain, shred, or otherwise look unhappy. I put three sections back in the box it came in, and left one out.
I also recommend working out of a bag for the bits of roving that are next in the queue but not currently attached to the spindle (or wheel, if that's what you're into). Paper or plastic bags are good (I prefer a gallon zipper baggie for reusability and visibility; this time I'm using a little paper bag from Panera). Fabric bags may snag and fuzz up the roving, but that's less a problem than the roving blowing in the wind.
 |
| At each split, I keep its twin in easy grabbing range so it's next in line. |
Splitting the Roving
The quickest, easiest option, that preserves the color schema from dyeing, is to split the roving.
This step is exactly as mystical and complicated as parting hairs all lined up straight after being combed.
Spread out the roving so it forms a flat-ish, thin-ish sheet. It will usually show a little bit of a thin spot in a place or three. Grab roughly half in each hand, and gently pull down the length of the roving. Voila! Two rovings!
 |
| Yeah, that's not quite the half-way mark, but it is a natural line. Good enough! |
Do that one more time. I prefer to stop here: each piece is fairly thin but still substantial.
 |
| Quarters: Roughly halfsies, twice. I did better than usual this time! |
Also, I don't always get the "about half" ratio quite right, leaving one really thin bit and another pretty thick. The thinner lengths will spin more quickly, and more true to the ratios of the original. Your call about how far you want to go with this, but I recommend stopping at 1/8s before you have much experience. After then, you'll know what works for you.
DISCLAIMER: This is not intended to be a "learn how to spin" post. I think
Abby Franquemont's presence on YouTube (and in her books) is quite better than I can manage any time soon. But, I'll show all the steps, minus the actual-spinning parts, since they're hard to photograph in the moment. Maybe eventually I'll get a camera I can operate by blinking - that's a thing, these days, right?
Fiber Management
Long, wispy fibers want to get caught up in your spinning. My best way of handling that is to wrap it around the base of my thumb - loose enough to slide off my hand later, tight enough to stay in place. This serves the function of a distaff, but I don't have the skill set to use that tool, yet.
 |
| "Batt management" - where batt is a similar treatment for processed wool (resulting in sheets instead of long ropes, to oversimplify). |
Length Quarter 1
Spinning!
In "stuff happens" news: the spinning drew from half of the roving and left the other half behind. There's ways to work that back in, but for the sake of simplicity: Let it Go! Split it!
 |
| Eighths. I guessed it might do this when I started getting blue-then-pink in the spinning before I ran all the way through the teal. |
Look at the pretty colors!! I don't know if you can see it from your monitor, but some strands feature two contrasting shades twining on each other, giving a speckled kind of effect on the strand. That'll be more obvious during the plying stage, where we put multiple strands next to each other.
I love this part of the spinning - watching each new color effect show up, while having an idea of what the overall effect will be.
 |
| From left - teal to blue to purple to pink. Each of the colors blends on the next. |
I'm half-heartedly trying to keep the colors separated on the spindle as they accrue - it's kinda tricky with the overlaps. This is what it looks like after that first bit: divided half, then half, then half (1/8th) of the total thickness, and 1/4 of the total length.
 |
First bit of roving: 1/8 by width, 1/4 by length. The white at the far right has some length of clear, solid white, but is mostly shot through with light and dark blues. |
I'll definitely aim for one or more photo per quarter roving (by length). I've found practice drills (whether focusing on quality or length) to be helpful every once in awhile. I'll try to get photos and charts of those, in the process. I usually spin about half a roving at a time on a spindle. More than that often gets unwieldy and somewhat less efficient to ply later.
Color Notes
Tones I'm seeing in the middle white sections as I go, numbered by sequential bit-of-roving:
- White shot through with light and dark blues
- Dark blue shot through with white
- White shot through with pink
- White shot through with pale pinks and blues
- Unicorn-like twists of white, pink, and light blue
- Primarily white with lacings of blue and pink
- Primarily white with hints of pink, then striped with purple at the end
- White shot through with purple
- White and purple, evenly
- Primarily white with sections of blue or purple
I was expecting more of these to be 1/16s, but no matter. It's still pretty cool to notice that no two identical in terms of the color composition!
 |
| Length #5, trying to keep the colors separate as I work them. Far right, teal, was the beginning of this piece. I'm just getting to the white part now, at the left/ whorl. The actual-green is stronger on this one than I've seen on most others so far. |
After about the third length, I noticed one end has some orange-ish coloring close to the ending teal section - you can see it a little bit in the above photo. The other end of these roving lengths doesn't have that orange. I'm not sure if that's a reaction between the pink and green, or what else might account for the atypical color. But! It's convenient for making sure that I'm getting each new bit oriented in the same direction as the preceding sections.
 |
| Length #10. Note how much room on the spindle is taken up. I didn't separate the color shifts this time. |
The colors are kinda muddy, now, and I don't like that as well as having them separated out a little more clearly. Good to know! I don't usually pay attention to such things, but it's been worthwhile to see it now.
Moving on!
Length Quarter 2
Today, my spindle feels very heavy, and that's a little cagey-making. So, I'm going to shift gears from here. This is not necessarily ideal, because I got a little bit into the second quarter before making this plan. But, whatevs.
 |
| On the spindle is all of the first quarter, plus a bit of the second. The coils and unspun roving attached to the spindle are what's left of the second quarter. |
So, the next step will be unwinding the spindle and concurrently collecting the yarn (hopefully strategically, to prevent tangles/breaks). Then, plying. Then it'll be for-real yarn!
Winding and Plying
I usually do this in a low-tech kind of way. I have a box with holes punched in it for a Lazy Kate.
 |
| First round: winding a center-pull ball from the spindle. The teal bit hanging off the ball (on the real fur backdrop) is folded over on itself to minimize un-spinning. |
- Ball the singles in-hand.
- Then, re-wind the ball, holding the inside and outside strands together. Do this as many times as you want strands in the ply - one time is two strands, two times is 4 strands. For this project, I wanted 4 strands.
- Then, add twist by attaching the yarn back to the spindle and letting it run in the opposite direction from initial spinning.
 |
| Two plies in the new little ball. In this step, be careful to hold the two strands parallel at even tension. Loose bits will twist on themselves and may knot up. |
I wanted this yarn to be 4-ply because it spun-up very fine and it won't felt, so I anticipate that it will not have much inherent durability. And, 4-ply will even out the yarn color and texture.
 |
| The color of the spun yarn is much more uniform than the unspun roving both because of the four plies concentrating the tones and also from splitting the roving, instead of working it as dyed. |
What am I Going to Do with That Yarn?
When spinning starts, so do the questions. The most frequent questions I field are (in no particular order in real life, but in order by answers here):
- What are you going to do with that yarn?
- How long does that take you?
- How much yarn do you get from spinning?
All of these questions can be intensely frustrating if I'm not ready for them, for a number of reasons. When they are stated in clear terms, the answers can still be severely variable. When they are not stated in clear terms, the questions often come across as "why would anyone waste their time when you can buy socks for $1 at Walmart?" Oy.
Rant: I appreciate that it's meant well - not everyone has a robust post-apocalyptic skill set. And, if you don't, you probably don't know how very ZEN it can be, to channel violent emotions into materials that yield pretty colors and intriguing textures and fabrics that serve an un-arbitrary function, bent to one's own will, should you have the skill... /ahem.
But if I'm ready, there are commonalities. And, if I get my game plan in place well enough in advance, I can even phrase my answers as, ah!, spinning a yarn (though, unfortunately, my story telling skills are clunky at best).
So, I recommend: Immediately when spinning starts, it's time to start thinking about what this fiber wants to be when it "grows up."
A lot of times, the fiber will talk to you, in any of a dozen ways. And, early work can influence end usefulness. If the yarn isn't forthright about communicating, some "cheats" apply, and yield perfectly functional end-product yarns.
Almost without exception, if I don't have a plan for a roving, I ply it (two strands), and put it in a cedar box until either the yarn speaks to me, or the box gets so full that I start forcing the issue. (The latter has never worked well for me.)
For this exact project:
This yarn is wool and therefore warm. It's spinning fine (as in very thin, and will produce lots of yardage), and therefore will also eat yardage (require lots) - so the project should be fairly small just to prevent heartache. And it won't felt, so it needs to be fairly light-wearing - ie probably not house slippers.
I'm thinking wrist-warmers, especially plying the thread to four strands for durability and a little more bulk. Wrist warmers don't take much yardage. Depending on the finished length, you might be able to get two sets out of a roving. Anyway, it's never too early for a knitter to start hoarding warm things for the winter holidays!
How Long Does That Take You?
I'll show my work in this section, starting with the quantifiables.
 |
| This is all that's left of the second quarter. Bottom is two halves that equal the top (give or take). I'll start with the bottom right piece. |
Pulled out the one piece, put everything else away. Set up a stopwatch. Then got going. I drafted too fast once, and the thread drifted and broke.
 |
| First piece: 28 minutes 2 seconds 58 milliseconds |
Do this again for the other three, to see how the commonalities fall.
The notes throughout this section apply to each of the rounds: yarn breaks, I get distracted, I forget to set the timer until I've already gotten past the first teal section.
 |
| Second piece: 25m 44s 69 ms |
But also, loose roving becomes yarn, it's wound onto the spindle, and muscle memory resets all the variables and we go again. I'm getting decent at spinning by feel, whenever I stop to think to do so.
 |
| Third piece: 35m 39s 56 ms |
And I've been more careful than usual to watch as I load the spindle, to keep the colors like-with-like - it's just nice for the photos, especially
considering that I bought this roving exactly for its colors.
Fourth piece: 37m 48s 20 ms
We'll meet again. Don't know where, don't know when...
Length Quarter 3
How much yarn do you get from spinning?
I split this quarter into 8ths, and thought I'd be clever and show the color differences working this way as opposed to 16ths.
I predrafted the first section of 8ths, to about the same thickness as a 1/16th. This is important to keep the colors together while spinning, as shown in the first Quarter 1 photo. I'm hoping that working with 8ths will give more variability in the color of the overall plied yarn.
Takeaways
It would be overstating things to say that I'm good at spreadsheets. I'd maybe phrase that as: I'm a spreadsheet junkie, always looking for another cheap fix. So, I've compiled the data from this project into a table for easier reference. I might try to time the 4th quarter for comparison, since the 2nd was shorter in length.
| Quarters | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
| Spinning Minutes | | 127.48 | | |
| Total Feet | | | | |
| Total Yards | | | | |
Feet are measured by wrapping a niddy noddy with a foot-long shaft.
Yards are calculated by dividing the total number of feet by 3.
Knitting
This is one of the primary pay-offs of the work of spinning: being able to handle yarn that I have a personal attachment to, and watching it reach its potential. So gratifying.
In writing out my notes for the end of the second quarter, it occurred to me that I'm setting myself up very nicely for wrist warmers - yay for me! I have a pattern that I developed my-own-self a year or three ago, and in spinning, plying, and hanking the yarns in quarters (ignoring the first awkward dividing line), I conveniently have four equal-ish sets of yarn - each can become one wrist warmer, equalling four total, two pairs. Convenient!
I've been writing out my pattern, and I'll post that live with the final update. I'm in the process of taking photos of an in-progress set, now, and I'll re-do that work for this yarn, too.
