The Singles Game

Last night, in a valiant attempt to avoid cleaning up the kitchen, I pulled out my trusty Kiwi wheel. The poor thing has not seen much action lately, so I thought that a Friday night spinfest might be in order. I decided to play with an inexpensive batt that I bought from Ancient Threads Fibers at the MA wool festival. The batt was long and skinny, and died in a bright progression of rainbow colors. I wanted to preserve the color progression, and I so I decided to try for some loosely-spun singles.

I have never spun singles without intending to ply them, so I did a little research first. Then I divided the batt into two long rainbow colored strips, set my wheel on its slowest ratio, and began to play. Now, I am a novice spinner, and I usually use some sort of short-draw technique, and I tend to spin the yarn fairly fine, with a lot of twist. So it was a bit of a challenge for me to slow things down a bit. But I wasn't particularly invested in coming out with a perfect product, so I just got into the zen of the moment, and suddenly hey! I'm doing long draw! Will you look at that! (Well, okay, you can't look, since DH was not around to take my picture. But imagine a look of surprise and glee on my face, as all previous attempts at anything resembling the long draw technique have resulted in great frustration.) I filled up two bobbins in a surprisingly short amount of time, which was rather satisfying.

Here are the end results, still on the skeiner (both skeins are on there):

And here is a close-up:
There is definitely not enough twist in places, so I'll have to be a bit careful when knitting the yarn, and I can't use it for anything that has to hold up to a lot of wear/abrasion (like socks). It might work for mittens if I knit it at a tight gauge. It's not the world's softest yarn, so I'm thinking that hats aren't a good option. I have no idea how many yards I have; I do have one more batt to spin, so I'll have two skeins of matching rainbow progression yarn. Any thoughts on what else I could make with them, other than a rainbow flag?

Also, any advice on spinning singles is welcome!