Not a Complete Failure
Published On: October 8, 2012

You guys are awesome to offer suggestions, thank you.  Let me see if I can explain my thinking just a bit.  When I decided to pick this particular bit of fluff back up, I sort of needed to get reacquainted with it.  One of the things I wanted to know was how long each of the pieces I had was.  So I wound it off onto my swift, and counted the number of revolutions.

Turned out the first skinny strand was 40 turns of the swift, the second one was 60, and the third (fattest) one was 30.  But, I had as many grams of fluff left unspun as in the fattest strand, so there was hope yet.  I spun up the rest of the fluff onto the end of the fat strand, and got to 60 turns of the swift when I was done.

Then came the (possibly ill-advised, but not disastrous) soak and dry.  I didn’t weigh it down or prevent it from twisting as it dried, so I don’t think I took all the life out of it.  Then it was time to get the strands wound up.  Good news bad news here.  The good news, is that the longer skinny strand and the fattest strand went onto their tubes just fine.  The bad news is that shorter skinny strand just broke and broke and broke.  Not sure why, don’t really care.  I made the executive decision that I’d just use the two long ones and consign the short breaky one to some sort of facility for recalcitrant fiber.

So here, making their debut on the blog, are some lovely toilet paper rolls.  They totally belong on the list of ‘stuff I never thought I’d show the internet.’

And here, is the gizmo I concocted to hold them while I worked.

Maybe saying lazy kate made it seem too grand (or maybe there’s something more to those I don’t know about yet so it wasn’t the right term?).  In any case, this is a plastic storage bin that usually holds my hair stuff, two straight needles, and two hair elastics.  Takes about 30 seconds to slap together, works great.

And finally, more or less proof that this worked.

Yeah yeah, it’s lumpy bumpy crap, but that’s ok.  I sort of wanted the fat and the skinny strands to have a greater difference between them.  The fat one uses twice as many grams of fiber to make the same length of strand, but apparently that’s not quite enough of a difference.  I may try it again with a greater delta.

I think this should end up giving me about 80 yards or so, and I have a solid color yarn that picks up one of those colors, so I’ll likely combine the two to make…something.  Not quite sure what yet.  But first, I have to finish with this.

And dude…does anyone else get a sore shoulder from doing this?  Because, um, ow.

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