Technique - Cable yarn spinning

For the past year I have wanted to try out a plying technique of cabled yarn. For this practice spin I took around 64g of play fiber that I had sitting around from a spinning class I took last year. The roving above is unnamed wool and feels similar to BFL or CVM, very springy and there was 48g. The color-way reminds me of spring and Easter eggs. I divided the roving into 3 - 16g batches and spun the fiber from the fold into three bobbins of singles.

As you can see with the bobbin on the right, I had 16g of additional left-over fiber in other colors. 12g were in a blue spring color-way that was similar to the Easter egg fiber above and then there was 4g of yellow wool that was Not as soft and had much less crimp. I spun this up into the fourth single. So as you can guess at this point you will need at least 4 bobbins to try this and 4 singles.

Now you take two of the singles and ply them together. The trick to this technique is to really over-ply the fiber and you may need to take what you just plied and run it back through again to get enough twist going. Repeat with the remaining two bobbins.

From here you take both bobbins that have been plied and spin them together as you would when spinning a single. Here you want to try and balance the twist as much as possible and this is how you get the cabled looking yarn.

As far as this experiment went- I had done a good job of plying the first bobbin, but the second bobbin had some problems. While it was plied well at the beginning it just did not quite have enough over-twist at the end. This made it hard to get the yarn to balance nicely at this point. In the future if I use this technique I need to probably just do a standard ply the first time and then run it back through a second time to get the additional twist needed. More time but will probably make a more satisfactory yarn in the end.

Why make cabled yarn? It is an inherently strong yarn so good for extreme wear and warmth. Gives interest to the yarn. Good for standard stitch knitting and lace not so much for pattern knitting as it get lost with the yarn texture.