You have perhaps already read in this blog post, that extreme knitting really has my attention lately. In that blog post I have been shown you how I made extreme knitting needles from broom sticks. Today I am going to show you how I prepared wool roving to be able to knit with it.

At first I just started knitting with the roving as it came. However, soon it became clear that this particular piece of knitting was very thick and stiff. Perhaps suitable for a thick rug, but not for the scarf I envisioned. In other words: my new extreme broomstick needles were too small for this “yarn”!

I wasn’t planning on making even bigger knitting needles, so something had to be done with the wool itself to make it suitable for the needles I had available. Also, the thought came to me that untreated wool roving knit into a scarf, would probably shed like a Wookiee in Springtime. Not a good look when wearing dark colored clothes.

Below the steps to prepare my roving for extreme knitting:

1. Splitting the roving length-wise. This way I not only halved the thickness, but also doubled the total length available for my scarf!

2. The result: Two large balls of roving. Because the roving is now significantly thinner, it also falls apart more easily when handled. This combined with the shedding problem led me to the idea to full/felt the wool.

3. To make sure the wool wouldn’t felt together in one big lump, I draped it on a large sheet like this:

4. Then I rolled up the sheet, making sure that the roving did not touch itself anywhere. When rolled up like a big sausage I used some waste yarn to make sure it stayed that way. After this the whole package was put in the washing machine on a short 30 minute / 30 degrees Celsius program.

5. Here my roving yarn is out of the washing machine and hanging to dry. It’s nicely felted as you can see!

6. And there we have it: A large ball of felted roving, ready for some extreme knitting.

Go to this page to see what I made out of this extreme yarn!

What I really love is to spin my own yarn and then design a pattern to use that yarn to its best advantage. Often I just use ready-dyed top or roving, for example from wonderful dyers like Dutch Wool Diva. Other times I start out with a raw fleece and clean and dye it myself, like I showed you in the dyeing wool tutorial. In this post, I want to show you the steps involved in making a tweedy yarn from the fiber I dyed before. The main characteristic of tweed yarn, consists of contrasting flecks of color on a solid or tonal background. In this particular yarn, I will be using sari silk threads as the contrasting component. I got mine from Bart & Francis.

Therefore, my starting materials consist of the following:

However, before the wool can be spun in threads, it has to be prepared. Because I wanted a somewhat “fluffy” yarn I carded the silk and wool together in fluffy batts, using my drum carder:

I alternated layers of wool and silk, starting and ending with wool. After this first pass, I removed the batt from the drum, tore it into strips and put it through the carder again to blend it better. The end result, three lovely fluffy purple batts, streaked with colorful silk:

Spinning

And then it was time to spin! I spun this yarn as a fat 2-ply on my vintage double drive spinning wheel. I didn’t mind some unevenness, because plying multiple singles together evens out a lot of irregularities. Besides, I really don’t mind a hand spun yarn being a tad rustic. Here’s a progress shot of spinning the singles:

And both bobbins full of singles, you can see the singles are somewhat thick-‘n-thin:

After plying both singles together, I had a wonderful aran weight 2 ply yarn, exactly as I envisioned it! I finished the yarn by giving it a wash to set the twist and snap the skein a bit to distribute the twist better. And there you have it: 189 m / 125 g of hand spun goodness, in this picture drying in the sun:

And of course the resulting and skeined up yarn! Truly from fleece to tweedy yarn, I used it in a cowl.