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What I Did With My 10 Days Off: Day 2 - Mmmmmmalabrigo

The only thing better than knitting with Malabrigo is spinning with Malabrigo and then knitting with it. I purchased this roving (pictured below) at Personal Threads in Omaha a while ago. In fact, I sort of started collecting all of the different colorways. Roving is always somewhat more cost effective than buying yarn in my opinion. In this case, $12 gets you 4 oz of hand-dyed roving and you get twice the time with it...however many hours spinning it up and plying it, and then however many hours knitting it on top of that. You can't beat it when it comes to playing with yarny goodness!

Nube is the name of this Malabrigo roving. It's 100% Merino wool and super-soft to the touch (just like Malabrigo yarn). This particular colorway below is "866 Arco Iris". I love this color combination...but who am I kidding? I love all of their color combinations.


I like to spin my yarn fairly thin. It started out as a challenge to myself to get it as evenly thin as possible. I've been practicing this for so long that spinning a heavier weight and non-uniform yarn is the bigger challenge now. This picture doesn't do it justice due to the lighting but you can at least get an idea of what the roving looks like un-bundled.


I started spinning this roving a week or so ago but today, I plied it. There was so much yardage that I was worried it wouldn't all fit and you can see it overflowing just a little on either end of the bobbin. I ended up with 327 yards total of basically fingering-weight yarn.


Once finished, I unwound it from the bobbin to create a skein. The skein still has to be processed (it's late for me so I will be getting to that tomorrow). Processing involves wetting the yarn completely - I use cold water but some people use first hot and then cold water. Then you squeeze the extra water out and beat it against a hard surface (usually for me, it's the inside of the bathtub) to "shock" the fibers and set the twist. Finally you hang it up to dry with a weight on the bottom end to weigh and pull it down.


Here's another colorway (below) that I spun and plied prior to the Arco Iris that I finished today. This one is "870 Candombe" and I got a total of 230 yards out of this bundle of roving. I had some issues with plying in that some of the newly-spun yard became knotted and had to be sacrificed to the fiber gods. Always a sad thing but at the time, attempting to un-knot it seemed like a lost cause.


I may have to go buy more of this colorway if it's still available. Seeing it on the skein doesn't do it justice because there's more orange and gold beneath all of the purple. This one is now off the bobbin as well and will be processed tomorrow.


My ultimate goal with all of my 4 oz bundles of Malabrigo roving is to spin them all up and knit myself a sweater, the style of which is yet to be determined. The one thing I do know is that it will be very colorful and soft when it's all done. Yum!

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