Tail spin

It's not what you think. There's a method of spinning fancy yarn and I'm obsessed with learning the technique. It's called 'extreme tailspinning' and trust me...it's extreme.

You start with the locks from a long wooled sheep, take those individual locks and spin just the tail of the lock into the base yarn, letting the lock hang free. It's spectacular. It's also really hard. Because you're spinning just the cut end of the lock into the yarn, it tends to get way overspun, so much that when you unwind the yarn from the bobbin, it kinks up into a tangled mess. So my challenge has been to spin the yarn without over spinning.

After a few attempts with some undyed locks, I finally got my head around it and figured out my own method. It takes some serious prep work so let me walk you through it.

First, I purchased a pack of locks from the local farmer's market.

It's hard to see in this picture but they're dyed some lovely autumn colors, golds and reds with some purples and blues. Very pretty and silky.

So when washing and dying locks, they don't all hold their shape. There's a certain amount of handling required and you end up with blobs of fiber. So the first step is to separate the locks from the fiber that didn't hold it's shape. The jumbled fiber I pick open into individual fibers for combing to use as my base yarn.

Here's a couple of locks on my knee. You can see the curly end on the right. This will hang down from the yarn. The fluffed out end on the left will be spun into the yarn

Here's a basket of locks ready for spinning. You can see the colors better. The entire process takes patience but since my patience with fiber is unlimited that's no problem for me.

 

All the fuzzy bits I put in a bag for carding to be the base yarn.

So in case you're curious, I've already been about an hour just on fiber preparation. And I'm not ready for spinning yet!

Stay tuned for the next stages of the process...