Spin Journal #16:
My Little Puni

     While I was at Black Sheep, Heidi (my fiber friend and frequent partner in crime) showed me a cool trick to create the raw material for unsual variegated yarns. She had attended something called "Spindle Camp" the previous week and, while there, had seen someone take bits of different colored tops, place them in thin layers, then use a puni stick--usually used in preparing cotton for spinning--to turn them into "wool punis"--basically, rolags without the hassle of dealing with handcards. Pretty cool, and a great way to sample, I thought.
     I purchased a couple of Fantasy Fiber's "Mystery Batts" so I could have something to spin (the stuff I had brought up from the stash turned out to be that nastiest of all breeds, Crappydale). Fantasy Fiber produces these weird and wonderful batts from a mixture of fibers: mostly merino, with alpaca, mohair, angora, ramie, silk (both tussah and bombyx), silk noils, rayon, llama, and firestar/flash. Different colors are layered onto one of their big drum carders, and they sell the batts dirt-cheap (less than $1.40 an ounce), so they're a great bargain if one can find something that's a blend of desirable colors. I dug in their Bargain Bins until I found two pretty similar batts and carted them away. I don't like spinning from a long strip torn from a batt, so I pulled each strip into smaller bits, then used Heidi's trick to turn them into punis to spin. I liked what I got--a rapid change in color/texture that had the capability of becoming a tweedy yarn when plied. I managed to get one bobbin filled before I came home from Black Sheep.

     Fast forward to the Tour de Fleece. I finished spinning and plying the Llanwenog on Saturday morning, and wanted to spin long-draw as a break from the "precise" spinning of short-draw, so I pulled out the rest of the Mystery Batts and got back to work on them. I weighed everything out so I would have a pretty even distribution between bobbins, then started turning the rest of the batts into punis. Lots of punis. That done, I put on my headphones, started listening to a trashy romance novel, and began spinning.

     Sunday morning dawned and I went back to work on spinning up all those punis. My long-draw spinning isn't quite as fast as it once was, primarily because I've learned better control over the fibers. In the past two years, I've gone from spinning a heavy woolen single that plies up to a bulky 2-ply to spinning a fairly fine single that plies up to a nice sport-weight 2-ply. I'm getting a lot more yarn to the ounce, but it takes longer to spin that ounce. I finished the trashy novel, downloaded another, and kept spinning. When finished, I had four bobbins--2 full, 2 nearly full--to start plying.
     I got the first bobbin full of plying finished and wound it off in time for Sunday's midnight deadline to post pictures of my new yarn. I think it's decent--a yarn that looks like a heathery blue-gray from a distance, but reveals its rainbow of colors on closer inspection. At this point, it still needs wet-finishing (which may change/lighten the color slightly), but first I need to finish plying all those singles.