spinning, carding, plying release.

The above pix are all of a yarn I recently spun for my good friend Cath's birthday. It was a big release making it, as apart from colour scheme it was a blank canvas for my imagination to run free.
I've been working on stuff for the York Steiner School Craft group, as we've got Spring Fair coming up, and also being quite specific about what I want the outcomes to be for what I spin, so it's lovely to let my hair down and have some fun with a yarn.
We started a Family Spinning Group at Grace and Jacob (Walmgate, York, Last Saturday of the month), and Fiona, the shop owner, let me loose on her drumcarders last time, so I made the batts that much of this yarn was spun from.Only once blended. Lovely fluffy, squidgy big batts, one made on a Louet, the other on a Barnett. (Think I prefered the Barnett, as it was easily adjustable and had smaller springier teeth. I suspect a more even blend will be possible with it than the big industrial teeth of the Louet, but would probably need DAYS of time and KILOS of fibre to play with to really be sure...)
Cath is fond of pinks and reds aswell as black, so I spun up a squidgy thick thin single and thought I might ply it with a thinner single of naturally black shetland. However when it came to it I decided on gold stitching thread, mostly because I wanted an exagerated "bumpy" plying effect, but also a bit of "bling" that might pull the at times disparate colours together; black might be too bold and distracting from the colour graduations too, especially when knitted up. A warm colour of a quite intense saturation seemed the thing. (I did unfortuantely run out of the gold, and had to use a very similarly toned brown, and then pale pink to complete the ply. The brown works better than the pink in my view). Cath was, in her words "delighted" with the yarn.

Navajo Ply, first attempt!

This is my first ever attempt at Navajo Plying!
Using my birthday money I splashed out and bought some handpainted wool tops (mostly in green of course). This one is from Wheeldale Woolcrafts, and very reasonably priced...
For my birthday I'd also got some books about spinning "Get Spun" by S North, and "Spin Control" by Amy Singer, the first a more"Art" (as opposed to the "primitive" or "punk" yarns I  produced in the beginning..)Yarn how to, the second, an in depth analysis and explaination of all the building blocks of skill, and their reasons for being in the spinning pantheon. These ofcourse have been inspiring me to develop my spinning repertoire, and causing many wide awake small hours brain meanderings of  spinning creativity, as I plot my next yarns... Some ofcourse just happen as they go along...
However, more to the point, the above yarn occured because I could actually UNDERSTAND Amy Singer's directions for Navajo Plying. This, I think, is because she likens it to chain stitch in crocheting, and really in essence that's all it is, a series of both edges of  the loops pulled through each other (in a chain), fairly large, and plied together with the strand you are holding, ofcourse the thing I hadn't previously realised was that Navajo Ply is a 3 ply, NOT a 2 ply! Well it's one Singles Plied on itself into a 3 Ply. Anyway....

It worked out okay, except that it's a little hard to keep the tension on all 3 strands even and sometimes mine crossed over. But when I did my (normal) 3ply sock wool (plant dyed greens, BFL and Cheviot, and natural Texel) I found that a little easier, see? Just above...