Friday, May 25, 2012

Looping Samples -- NOT Cabled Yarn

 6-2-12 Update -- Andrea's comment on this post led me to take another look and sure enough, this was Navaho plying. I've torn apart the studio and can't find the cabled sample or any more of the cabled yarn. Will spin some more cabled yarn and make another sample to post. Thanks, Andrea!

This post is the start of a series showing finished projects and experiments from my New Age Looping sample case.


A couple of years ago in an awesome spinning class with Deb Jones at Sievers, I learned to make cabled yarns. I really liked how stable they were and thought they might marry well with looping, so I experimented with that a bit more when I got home. This sample was from cabled yarn I made with plies made from haphazard color blending at the wheel.

In this sample, I was playing with knotted stitch variations, including one I call "triple crown." Even with some serious overtwist, I do like the way a cabled yarn behaves in this structure. But as with Navajo plying (which I love doing), cabling makes it harder to break and spit splice the yarn when a thread runs out.

Turns out, cabling was a passing infatuation. But I'm glad to have this memory of that flirtation.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you for posting this. It was oh, so tantalizing in the video, but even when I paused the video, it still wasn't clear enough to see the structure of the piece.

    How did you cable this yarn, do you remember? Because in the photo, it doesn't appear cabled. It looks like a four-ply yarn, but the "braided" look I am used to with cabling doesn't appear.

    Here's a photo on someone's blog (I just Googled 'cabled yarn', so NAYY) of cabled yarn:
    http://spiritedspindle.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-green-n-pink-cabled-yarn.html

    The third photo in the series is the highly twisted first plying, before the ply back that will create the final four-ply cable.

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  2. Andrea, it's quite possible my memory is faulty on this. What I remember most clearly is loving the "roundness" of the yarn, but not loving how hard it was to break off. This might have been Navajo plying as well and only cabled in my imagination. I still have the tails on the piece, so will go pick them apart and see how far off base I was!

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  3. Sorry to precipitate the tearing apart of your studio, but I do empathize with you. I know all too well the frustration of wanting to find something that I KNOW I have but can't put my hands on.

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  4. Studio could use a little more tearing up, Andrea -- then a good housecleaning to get rid of some stuff!

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