By Amelia © October 12, 2010 I find myself once again with a nice group of local learning-to-spinners, this time in Port Angeles actually on the college campus. Very fun! We had our first class last week, and I left them with notes on how to finish a skein. On reviewing my blog, I found these weren't clearly spelled out in any of the posts, though I've gone on about the variety of finishing we do on our skeins before, so here are my basic skein washing notes for your edification.
"The skein isn't done until it's washed" ... sometimes we call this wash setting the twist, but really what it is doing is waking up any dormant twist in the single so that the plying twist can balance against it.
You start with an already spun and plied skein, with suitable ties on the skein (at least 3 for an arm-wound skein, more for longer skeins).
1. Open up (as in, untwist) your rolled-up and twisted-on-itself skein.
2. Fill a sink with warm water and a squirt of dish soap, shampoo, or
wool wash (i.e. Eucalan, SOAK or similar; NOT Woolite)
3. Place your skein in the sink. You can hold it under until it stays
submerged if you like, but don't move it around.
4. Let it soak 10-20 minutes.
5. Lift out the skein and squeeze the soapy water out of it.
6. Empty the sink.
7. Fill the sink with just water, the same temperature as before.
8. Place your skein in the sink. You can hold it under until it stays
submerged if you like, but don't move it around.
9. Let it rinse-soak for 10-20 minutes.
10. Lift out the skein and squeeze the water out of it. Empty the sink.
11. Roll the skein up in a towel and press down on the rolled-up
skein-and-towel to get more water out
12. Unroll the towel-and-skein and hang the skein over a rail
somewhere (like your shower) to dry
There you have it.
The skeins above were from a variety of spinning experiments, both mine and my daughter's.
I would note that I don't mix dyed skeins in my finishing baths -- one red skein once leached onto an undyed white, leading to an unfortunate pinkness that dogged that skein until I found a nice forest green for it. Pink really wasn't its color!
It's a lovely skein of CVM wool, and is listed in By Our Hands on Etsy and TheBellwether.com.
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Past posts discussing finishing a skein:
When do you set the twist?
How do you make a good looking 2-ply yarn?
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© October 12, 2010 by Ask The Bellwether, posted at http://askthebellwether.com/blog
