Ply me.
Wednesday, May 18th, 2005Thanks for everybody’s plying knowledge and suggestions! The conclusion was plying from a centre-pull ball works just fine, but even better is plying from two storage bobbins…
When you ply from a centre-pull ball, the distance from the wheel is relatively short and the singles have a tendency to twist back on themselves while plying so it is difficult to get an even twist throughout the yarn. Instead, when you wind each half of the singles onto a separate storage bobbin, you can set the bobbins up on a lazy kate a few feet away from the wheel, helping to even out the twist.
After spending far too much time reading through [June's Two Sheep blog](http://www.twosheep.com/blog/) and researching electric bobbin winders, I took June’s recommendation and bought a hand-made electric bobbin winder off Ebay. Is it crazy that electric bobbin winders are often $265 USD? The one I bought was $91 USD — sounds like a deal to me.
Since it will take about 2 weeks for the bobbin winder to arrive and all my bobbins are full of singles, I had to ply some. So, I wound them off with the ball winder into little centre-pull balls:
Here’s the 2-ply made from the centre-pull balls:
And finally, here is a crockpot dyeing disaster (grey roving + too much dye + felting) that I spun into slubby singles:
####Read these…
* [Bobbin winder, revisited (Two Sheep)](http://www.twosheep.com/blog/?p=230)
* [More than you ever wanted to know about storage bobbins (Two Sheep)](http://www.twosheep.com/blog/?p=221)
* [Storage Bobbins (Textile Link)](http://www.textilelinks.com/author/rb/020609.html)
* [My new electric bobbin winder](http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=3125&item=8191861012&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW)
