Do I mean the spindle I’ve been working with or the fiber I’ve been working with ? I don’t know. Originally I meant the fiber but really it applies to both.
I now have two spindles—the Navajo spindle and a top whorl drop spindle. Since it’s about time I name these spindles, I hereby christen them Shadi (Navajo) and Shideezhi (top whorl). They should be Navajo names that mean “older sister” and “younger sister”.
Shideezhi was a Christmas present from a friend this year. I’m loving having two spindles because now I can use Shadi to spin plastic bags and Shideezhi to spin fiber.
I’m making a very special thank-you gift for a friend’s mother. In the end it will be a lace scarf using yarn that I spun, dyed, and knitted myself. I ordered eight ounces of the softest fiber I’ve worked with yet—alpaca. I shouldn’t need all eight ounces for the scarf, but since this is my first time spinning and dyeing alpaca I wanted to have extra on hand.
My first thought upon spinning the alpaca: “It’s like spinning butter! It spins like a DREAM, baby!!” And thus the title of this post. The alpaca is smooth and soft and lovely. It’s so smooth that I was afraid it would pull apart on me before I could get any twist going. I do have to be careful because it’s easy for what I’m spinning to pull out of the main fiber chunk when I’m setting it down or moving it, but it’s also easy to splice. Overall, I’m finding nice alpaca much easier to spin than the cheap wool I initially got to practice with. The alpaca was practically begging me to spin it into laceweight from the start, which is great because that’s what I wanted to spin. I’ve gotten a lot better at drafting while practicing with Shideezhi, so I’m hoping that when I go back to fiber on Shadi eventually I may not have to park and draft anymore.
Were I to start learning to spin all over again, I would still buy the potluck roving to practice with.
I needed to test-dye a bit of the yarn anyway since I’ve never dyed alpaca before and all fibers behave differently, but I also used this as an opportunity to test a new dyeing method. A few months ago I read mention that dye takes up more evenly if one soaks the yarn in the dyebath rather than just water+acid in preparation.
What do I mean by ‘evenly’? If one is not dyeing primary colors, dyes can tend to split into primary colors and take up separately. If they take up separately but in the same spots, it’s not that noticeable to the non-fiber-obsessed eye. For example, when purple takes up separately, you’ll end up with a blue “core” to the yarn surrounded by a dusting of red on the surface of the yarn and on the flyaway fuzzies. When green takes up separately, you’ll have yellow on the outside instead of red. If you don’t look closely at the yarn, it still looks purple or green. If you shove your face into the hank, you’ll notice the differences.
According to what I heard, this can be prevented by allowing the yarn to soak in the dye along with the water and acid, allowing all the colors in the dye to get into all the different parts of the yarn before heat starts setting the color in. I suspected that the red dye would soak up, then the blue, resulting in breaking of the color. I tried it. I mixed up a miniature dyebath in a glass, put a yard or so of my handspun alpaca in it, and let it sit all afternoon. I microwaved it in the evening. The results were what I expected: Worse rather than better.
I’ve made up my mind—when it’s time to dye this alpaca, I’m graduating to professional acid dyes. I found a brand that is environmentally-friendly and a kit of it even has citric acid included.
