Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Before and After
I was lucky enough to be at Mary's place when she had just gotten a shipment of new fabulous roving. As I mentioned in a previous post I bought 2-8 ounces balls to try of 100% Merino. Here is the before... This is Snapdragon roving and this is Snap Dragon in the process of becoming yarn. These are the bobbins that I used. The smaller one is the bobbin you spin the roving on to and the larger one is the Plying bobbin. I wanted to show the difference in sizes.



This is the Swift that you put the plied yarn onto to make a skein or a hank. You can measure how many yards you have and then of course you need to weigh the yarn too. I don't have a fancy scale. I use a food scale from Walmart. It works.

This is the plied skein. It weighed in a 7 ounces and 294 yards. I got 7 ounces of yarn from 8 ounces of roving. I still have the bits and pieces that broke off and will eventually use them to make a misc. kind of yarn. I will have to untwist it and then maybe comb it into all the other bits that I have in zip lock bags.

I am not sure if I really like the way the yarn turned out. I can say that it reminds me of one of those suckers that you buy at the county fair that is wound up in a huge circle. Do you know the ones? This yarn looks exactly like that. Too bad I can't eat it!

4 comments:

Tracy Batchelder said...

It's hard for me to tell what the yarn looks like from the picture, but your description is a good one. The first thing I thought of when I saw the roving was salt water taffy. How appropriate that the yarn would look like a county fair sucker. I bet it will be pretty when knitted.

Anonymous said...

I, too, am surprised at how the yarn came out. It's more pastel-looking than I'd thought it would be. Very much like the experience I'm currently having with varigated yarn. I bought several colorways, and some look good in the ball and bad knitted. Others look bad in the ball and good knitted.
Perhaps WoolWinder is right, and knitting it will bring it back to beauty.

vlb5757 said...

I am sorry about my photographs. I still haven't figured out how to do a close-up picture. I really need to take a photography class!

vlb5757 said...

Susan-I sure hope so and so agree with your statements about one looking good as yarn and bad knitted. That is how I feel about the Snap Dragon. I sure hope it knits up better than it looked in my less than clear photo! I will post it on the blog as soon as I figure out what to knit it up as.