Spinning masham

As well as knitting this month, I’ve been working on my first spin which required a degree of preparation and planning (rather than my usual method of throwing the fibre at either spindle or wheel and seeing what results!).
The fibre came from a fibre club at Fibre Hut in the West Midlands. When I first opened the parcel I must confess it was not a fibre I would have chosen myself. The colours are not ones I would usually be drawn to, and the fibre itself is quite rough at first touch.

The 100g braid is Masham (pronounced “massam”) wool. The Masham sheep is a crossbreed, from a Teeswater ram on a Swaledale ewe. Both these breeds produce a long, strong fleece. I hadn’t spun anything that could be called a Longwool before, and drafting it was interesting at first. I also hadn’t spun a multicoloured dyed top without intentionally preserving the colours before but I wanted to try mixing this one up.
I decided to try a fractal spin. This method involves stripping the length of roving or top lengthwise, and then dividing those strips into progressively narrower strips. Because this braid was quite narrow to begin with and I wanted a 3-ply, I was limited in how many times I could divide it.

I started by stripping the braid into three lengths. The first piece (centre top) was left as it was, and that became my first ply. The second piece was divided in half lengthwise (lower left) and the two sections then spun one after the other end to end, starting from the same end of the braid each time to become the second ply. The original braid had been cream at one end and yellow-brown at the other, so I just spun from the cream until I reached the end, and then started again with the cream end of the second piece. The third piece of the braid was split into quarters lengthwise (lower right). The four pieces were then spun one after the other, cream end first, to form the third ply.

I had intended to make a traditional 3-ply yarn, but of course the best laid plans of mice and men and all that... I guess the spinning mice must have had a hand (a paw?) in this one, because of course two of the plies turned out to be almost exactly the same length, running out within inches of one another, but my third bobbin still had a substantial amount of singles left. (The third ply, if anyone’s interested!). Waste not, want not, so I chain plied that last bit into a mini skein.

The colours in the original fibre were really quite analogous so really it shouldn’t be too surprising that the final plied yarn has a fairly uniform overall colour, a light spring green. The yellow and pale turquoise in the fibre combined together would appear green, and there was light green in there too. You have to get really quite close to the yarn to see that actually many of the strands have at least two different coloured plies. It’s also interesting to see how the chain plied mini skein has brighter colours than the traditional plied main skein. Avoiding mixing the colours in the plies keeps them truer and the darker greens and browns don’t dull the yellow sections.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this knits up. It has softened up a bit in washing and finishing but it isn’t soft enough for a scarf. It should make a good hat or mittens though.
I’d use this technique again. Maybe I’ll try it on a fibre with more colour variation next time.