On Saturday I decided to make supercoil yarn out of a couple of my Spring Meadow batts. Just as I was starting, I thought it would be fun to invite you into my family room to see how I made it, so grab a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and join me. 🙂

First of all, let me start with a confession. I used to hate making supercoil yarn. The core yarn would get more and more overspun as I went until it was completely unusable–until I came up with a method for keeping the core yarn straight while spinning. I’ll talk about it later on in this post.

Here is one of the batts I started out with. I made these last week and included a combination of merino, finn wool, alpaca, bamboo, mulberry silk, kid mohair locks, and angelina–in other words all the good stuff. I brought it outside so you could see it in the morning sunlight.

I started by tearing the batt into strips about 2 inches wide and then spinning it into a thick and thin yarn. I purposefully overspun it some because I knew I was planning on turning it into a supercoil yarn, which would mean plying it in the other direction using a technique that means more twist in the plying stage than the spinning stage. Here I am spinning it thick and thin.

 

Here’s the bobbin full. That’s what 4 ounces of bulky thick-and-thin yarn looks like in case you’re wondering.

Here I am winding it on to my lovely plastic center-pull ball winder. Well, it ain’t pretty but it is serviceable.

And here is the whole skein on the center-pull ball winder. It’s a good thing I didn’t make any more, isn’t it?

Next step is to start making the supercoil yarn. To do that, I’ll need to use a core yarn. I chose a nice, strong cotton yarn for that. The color doesn’t matter because I’ll be covering the entire thing in the yarn, but it’s not a bad idea to choose a coordinating color just in case a little bit peaks out now and then. The core yarn is a sage green, so while it’s not in the yarn, it won’t clash either.

As I mentioned above, I had previously sworn off supercoil yarn, and I think I may have sworn at it sometimes too. 🙂 Every time I tried to make it, I found myself with a disaster. The core would get more and more and more twisted as I went until it was completely unusable. I tried several techniques to help with that. The first time, my husband was kind enough to keep tossing the core yarn in the form of a skein (we had rewound it into a skein to try to help with this) up in the air. Think of someone tossing pizza dough, and you’ll get the idea. Well, it helped some, but it was still a twisted mess, and I couldn’t really expect my husband to toss my yarn every time I wouldn’t to make supercoil yarn, now could I?

Next, someone recommended running the core yarn through the spinning wheel quickly to remove some of the twist before starting. I did this, but it didn’t really help–at least not enough.

Finally, I came up with a technique that worked. I wound the core yarn onto my hand spindle, connected the end of the core yarn to the spinning wheel, and let the spindle dangle and spin in the opposite direction to release the tension on the core yarn so it would stay balanced as I spun the yarn on the wheel. I found it helped to stop and let the spindle spin until it stopped on its own now and then. It worked beautifully! I had finally come up with a way to spin supercoil yarn without torture.

Next confession: I couldn’t find my hand spindle the morning I was spinning the Spring Meadow batts. Not only that, but this is what I had planned to do with the morning while my husband took our toddler and the other kids, and they would be back in just a couple hours. What now?

and here’s a closeup of me winding the yarn onto it. See? I brought my coffee too. Would you like another cup?

Here’s the mast (that should be a hand spindle ideally) hanging down from the spinning wheel. You can see the pen cap I used to keep the core yarn from coming off the would-be spindle until I was ready for it.

 

And here I am starting to spin the yarn around the core. Notice how the yarn is at an angle here. After spinning it onto the core at about an 80 degree angle…

…the next step is to push it up. I usually like to push the yarn up the core about every inch or two inches. Otherwise it gets a little mushy.

Here’s the bobbin with the supercoil yarn winding on. The thing that makes it so much fun to work with highly textured batts is the adventure of seeing what’s coming next. The bamboo was super soft and silky, the mohair was soft and curly and feathery, the silk was, well, silky, and the wool was just soft and delightful as it ran through my fingers.

Oops. I ran out of core yarn on my spindle thingy. Since the core yarn will be completely covered, that’s okay. I took out more core yarn and wound it onto my hand spindle substitute. I just held the old and new strands together and made an overhand knot. When I spin the soon-to-be supercoil yarn, I’ll just make sure cover the knot well.

Next came the moment of joy. My husband and the kids came home, and on the off chance that someone had seen it, I asked if anyone knew where my hand spindle was. My daughter had decided to be Sleeping Beauty for Halloween this year, and she had absconded with it to use as part of her costume. She had actually asked if she could use it, but it had totally slipped my mind. At that point I was able to switch to the real tool, and my daughter helped me with the photos a bit too. It started to go quite a bit faster after that because I had something better than a pen cap that kept coming out of the mast.

This is a good photo for seeing the angle I held the yarn to ply it. This will vary somewhat depending on the yarn, but somewhere between about 70 and 90 degrees should work. Each time I needed more core yarn, I wound about 18 inches off the spindle and then wrapped the yarn around the hook at the top of the spindle a couple times so no more came off until I was ready for it.

Here it is again from a different angle:

Ta da!

I moved to the table on the back porch because it was such a gorgeous day outside and started winding the yarn from the bobbin onto my skein winder.

Here it is all on the skein winder. The single-ply yarn was 4 ounces (between 80 and 100 yards long), and the supercoil yarn came out at 44 yards long.

Here’s a closeup. Again, the green at the bottom is bamboo, which came out so delightfully in the supercoil yarn, and I loved the soft curls of the mohair locks as well. After photographing it, I checked the wraps per inch (between 3 and 4) and then tied the ends together. I loosely tied some yarn around the skein in two different spots. I used to use four ties, but two seem to work just as well.

Before I washed it, I wanted to show you how much it twisted. Rita Buchanan (one of my favorite spinners and weavers) would say not to worry about how over-twisted something looks until after you have washed. Washing it gives the yarn a chance to relax.

Here’s one of my sons holding it. He’s sort of camera shy (which is silly because he’s really cute, if I may say so myself), so only his arm is in the photo.

Next it was time to wash and set the yarn. FYI, I never use weights to set my yarn. As Jacey Boggs would tell you, if you weight it and then knit with it and then wash it, the stitches will get all funky. Setting the yarn unweighted means what you see is what you’ll get.

Here I put the yarn in warm water with a little Original Dawn Detergent. I let it soak for a few minutes and then rinsed it several times to get the soap out. There was a little bit of dye left as well, so I rinsed until the water was clear. Now, normally I’m not all that gentle with my yarns, but in the case of supercoil yarn I am pretty careful. With each rinse, I held the yarn out of the water and refilled with fresh water and then set the yarn back in and gently swished it around.

Here is the yarn hanging when it was nearly dry. Notice how it still twists a little but not nearly as much as it did before I washed it. Given that it’s a supercoil yarn and not a regular 2-ply yarn, I’m actually quite satisfied with just this little bit of twist. Our dog, Pfifltrigg (yep, that’s his name), was coming to see if I was ready to play.

And here is the final product. I made the batts, spun the yarn, supercoiled it, washed it, dried it, and now it’s ready to go. Now the big question is this: Do I keep it to make something from myself or do I put it in my shop?

There are two more of my Spring Meadow batts just like the ones I used here available in my shop:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/253125205/soft-spinning-batts-art-batts-to-spin-or?ref=shop_home_active_4

In the next day or two, you’ll find this yarn in the super bulky section of my shop which can be found here:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/PurpleLamb?section_id=17442646&ref=shopsection_leftnav_8

Meanwhile, happy fiber artistry!