My project for Thing-a-Day today has been in the works for quite a long time. This project was my first try at spinning cotton. It is a cotton and recycled denim fiber blend. I spun it on a Bosworth book charkha and after I filled three spindles I wound the singles off together onto a weavers storage bobbin using a bobbin winder. Here's a photo showing how I set it up (please ignore the current singles on the spindles as they are just things I'm sampling now on the charkha).
When one spindle ran out of singles on it, I would break off the other two, spin each spindle full again, splice the singles on the spindles to those on the bobbin and wind off again onto the bobbin. I repeated this cycle until I ran out of fiber.
The singles had a lot of twist when I wound them off to the bobbin. I let them stay on the storage bobbin for quite a while until they were 'stale' and I didn't have to fight the active twist and snarls while plying. To ply the singles, I slipped the drive band off of the bobbin winder and put a little hand weight on its base and used it as a lazy kate. I plyed all three singles using a folding Lendrum wheel with a plying head.Normally, I wind the yarn off into a skein, wash and set it but this time I decided to wind it off directly into a centerpull ball using a nostepinne
Since cotton yarn has so absolutely no stretch it is very stessful to me to knit at a tight gauge. To avoid the stess on my hands, I thought I could knit it loosely then wash and dry it using high heat. Being cotton, maybe the piece would shrink and tighten up the knitting and spare my hands.
Finished knitting and ready to toss in the washer and dryer. We'll see how the shrinking experiment works….
