It just gets better and better!

Oh the spinning is getting better!

It's amazing to me how much learning on a wheel has helped me with the drop spindle. I'm getting consistent, thin singles now. Which, on the whole, is a great thing since I don't have a wheel yet and have gotten no bites on the things I've put up on craigslist that would finance that wheel.

Has anyone heard of the "Miss America" ply? At least that was what one of my instructors this weekend called it. It's great for making sample size skeins, not so much for full size. It has worked great so far.

This ply begins with you wrapping one end of your singles around your middle finger a few times and then moving the wrap to around your hand and continuing to wrap until you get to the end of the single. You then unwrap the single from around your middle finger, then put both ends together and attach them to either the spindle or your wheel. As your wheel or spindle begins to be twisted to the left, you move your wrist so that the hand moves up and down slightly, thus allowing the yarn to move off of your hand from both top and bottom. It really is difficult to write this down. I'll definitely get this for you in a video sometime soon.

I have been scouring the web for videos on plying and there are very few for the drop spindle. I hate that. For those of us who don't have the money to go take a lot of classes or don't have access to someone who can mentor us, it's so frustrating. (Especially for those of us in warmer climates where there just aren't that many spinners let alone knitters.) I hadn't been able to really "get it" from reading about it. I needed to see it either in person or in a short video. Why aren't there more out there?


In the pic below is some examples of this weekend's spinning adventures. The skein on top was done on a wheel and plied with a wheel. The bottom one (which I'm quite proud of) was done on the drop spindle and plied with the spindle. Both were done with the "Miss America" ply.

Click to enlarge me!

And now that I've written up this post, I'm going to sit and watch my site statistics to see how many hits I get for "Miss America". It should be amusing to see how many people click on this post expecting to see long-legged voluptuous women instead of long-skeined voluptuous yarn. :)