Are you ready for a Luthvarian soap box speech? If you’re going to make yarn, for goodness sake, use it!
Once I discovered spinning, a switch flipped in my head. I loved the process of making yarn. I loved the feel of fibers in my fingers. I began making yarn like crazy. I didn’t even have time to think about making something with my new yarn, there was more new yarn to make! Then one day, I finally decided to work up some of my handspun.
Every failed project I’ve ever made is this particular shade of teal.
I picked a teal skein of underspun suri alpaca and decided I wanted a cowl. So I knit a cowl! And you know what? It was the ugliest, limpest piece of garbage I’d ever knit up until that point! It was a dumpster fire before dumpster fire was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. What went wrong?
Well, I didn’t take into consideration that suri was already drapey and that under-spinning it wouldn’t make it drapey… a yarn with absolutely no energy is limp, not drapey. A cowl also wasn’t the project for this yarn. I would have known this immediately after making the yarn if I had swatched it or knit it up immediately. Instead, in the time between making this skein and knitting it, I had made several other limp skeins as well. While I was able to go back and fix my limp yarns, I could have avoided the problems if I’d knit my first skein sooner.
I’m not telling you to knit every skein you make immediately after you spin it. But don’t let it sit in your stash untouched for years. There are lessons to learn about how-to-spin hidden away in those skeins. You’ll never become a better spinner if you don’t use the yarn that you make!