SpinnySpinny

The cotton is in to boil, I had a bit of a problem there when one of my bobbins ran empty while plying but it’s all better now. Spin up more and then paste the whole mess back together and continue. Novelty yarns are great for hiding things like that. It isn’t even a good splice.

Much to my amazement, I skeined it off and the plying is almost perfectly balanced. Not what I would expect from thick and thin single plus the weird plying to get the eyelash blobs in there. Skeining it with the bobbin on the other side of the room helps even things out, but that still won’t fix too much or too little twist. I did a sample, but it’s hard to keep it even when you are also fooling with the yarn in the process.

Since this is partly naturally green cotton, not only am I boiling it but I am boiling it a good long time. I don’t even know how long, I’ll go fish it out when I feel like it. It took a while to even get it to sink in the water. I added some baking soda because I didn’t want to deal with boiling soapy water. (I wanted an alkaline solution.) Then it gets washed. Boiling cotton removes the waxy coating of the fibers, you don’t have to if you don’t want to but you are supposed to if you are going to dye the yarn. I don’t dye enough cotton to know what difference it makes. But with colored cottons, boiling makes the color darker. It’s supposed to make white cotton more white also, but it sure gets a bunch of nasty stuff out. The water is a nasty brown color.