So this is a continuation of the last post, where I spun 40 grams of fibre onto my Jenkins Swan. I wound the turtle in that neat and tidy way that I saw most spindlers on Instagram doing. They are lovely. However, I discovered that when I removed the shaft and arms, the edges started to peel away. I had noticed this on several earlier occasions, but just figured that I was somehow doing something wrong in my wrapping. Not this time. I paid close attention.

The quality of this photo is awful and I apologize for that. However, You can see the layers clearly coming apart.

So when I spun the second 40 grams, I continued to wind “over two, under one” but didn’t try to line the fibre up in a neat way. The turtles ended up being the same size, so there goes that theory that winding it neatly allows you to get more yarn onto your spindle. (This was my theory.)

So here they are side by side. The random wind-on is on the left. The carefully wound one is on the right.

For plying I made a two-stranded ball and to assist me in this I put the turtles into our French Onion Soup bowls. They are the perfect size and heavy. Things went well for the first half, but as the centre hole got larger, the yarn from the carefully wound turtle started coming out in clumps. I think the fibres stick to each other when they are carefully wound like that.

Here’s an 80 gram double stranded ball that I plied using my Snyder Steampunk spindle. It’s my go-to spindle for plying. It’s heavy, fast and I can get a lot of yarn onto it.

There’s 80 grams on this baby. Measured out at 192 yards or 177 metres.

The moral of the story?  Carefully wound turtles, while beautiful, take longer to wind and are not solid stable balls. In the singles stage when the twist is really active, you want as much stability as you can get.

That’s my story.