and then winding into a skein prior to its first bath:
I should mention that while plying, I did a lot of cursing and dropping and untangling and trying not to remember that I have a spinning wheel in the closet upstairs I could very easily have used for almost no-fail spinning practice. I'm a little afraid of touching the spinning wheel this close to Christmas with so much still to do, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.While I was indulging in all that mental and physical anguish, I was prepping some of the destash yarn my friend dropped off last month for possible sweater use:
I thought it could use some freshening up before it went to work.Spinning is new enough to me that can count on one hand the number of times I've given yarn a bath for any reason, and I've never given two different varieties of wool a bath on the same day. It was interesting because:
in addition to the difference in feel (the purple is a little rough, while the Polworth is cotton-ball soft and pillowy, just the way it looks on the swift if my camera did a good enough job to show it)
there was a marked difference in scent.
When wet, the purple smelled like wet wool always smells, and then some - strong to the point of Ew. But the Polworth smelled sweet, the way it did when I first opened the bag of fiber and the way it's smelled ever since. Being wet didn't change it at all. I found that weird, or at least unique in my experience of woolly behaviour.
I took my sniffer over to the bag of hand-dyed Polworth I bought in September and that fiber smells of dye, so I still don't know whether undyed Polworth is just really nice, or whether mine was perfumed in some way; I'm allergic to perfume though, and this isn't giving me headaches, so if it is perfume it's something very natural.
Not that I care much, really. I am just very excited for making the particular toy I have in mind out of such magical fiber as this, and for finding out whether knitting Polworth is as fabulous as spinning and hugging it.
3 comments:
I always smell yarn too :) No matter if it's wool or not. The strongest smelling yarn I've worked with is Kauni Effektgarn, I swear it still smells of sheep :) but I love it!
I love the smell of a raw fleece, so strong smelling yarn doesn't bother me, but there certainly is a difference.
When you're plying balls of yarn- you can put the yarn in a cup (if it's not a big ball), and thread the end over and around the handle and then up to your spindle for plying. That adds a bit of tension, and helps to keep the ball from jumping out and rolling across the floor.
(full disclosure- I didn't think that one up, I saw it in a video recently)
I actually love the smell of sheep; but I wonder whether the undyed Polwarth was less smelly because of the scouring agent used on it? (That's the stuff you use on raw fleece to get the ickies out.)
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