The challenge for team Suck Less, our equivalent of the mountain day in the “real” TDF, was to spin a mile.

Now, ideally, I would have spun a mile of completed yarn. But that wasn’t going to happen because the only projects I have for singles yarn are weaving, and I need to be more careful than I could be when speed spinning for those. And the chance of my spinning a mile of plied yarn, not so high.

Saturday, I set out to see how far I could get. I sat down at Strider with some lovely open BFL top that I had, and started to spin. Now, normally, most people don’t longdraw from a top prep, but I don’t currently have any roving or batts that I was willing to sacrifice for as speed spinning day. So… I worked from top, which was a learning experience. Especially so, since I’ve never spun much true longdraw before.

It took me one false start and 3:10 to get the first bobbin done. The second bobbin was 2:50, and the third 2:15. Which gave me three full bobbins, and some short breaks for eating, stretching, and drinking.

I started to ply and quickly realized I was having take-up problems with Strider. He just didn’t want to wind on the yarn. I had noticed a little during the initial spinning, but it hadn’t been a problem since doing longdraw I didn’t want much take-up. But I didn’t have time to mess around with it much, so I needed tension on my lazy kate.

So, being a budding Ph.D. as I am, I came up with a highly technical solution…

That’s a computer case. It worked pretty well, but didn’t catch all the bobbins, so the middle one still spun and caused me some issues (the singles from that one liked to make their own little supercoils that then plied in. Ugh).

So, 14 hours from start I had this…

482 yards of three-ply BFL (one of the small skeins is navajo plied).

I also spun an extra 320 yrd bobbin of singles yarn, putting me over the mile mark of singles. And if you include the plying, then I’m 500 yards more over. Woot.

So, I spun a mile of singles, and plied 500 yds of yarn in 14 hours. Not bad. I’m going to say that, at least for me, that qualifies as “Sucking Less.” Though I don’t think I’ll be putting up most of this yarn for sale, as I’m not terribly happy with it. I think I can now use longdraw to make salable yarn, so that’s also a success.

I’ve got some fiber to put up, will get that up tomorrow for everyone. Back to the paper.

~The Gnome