The tale of a tangled bobbin

You have heard me talk about it, you have seen it and you may have felt the pain of it yourself. But when lovely handspun gets all messed up, it is hard not to feel sorry for oneself.

I had full intentions of rescuing as much of the yarn as I could. I tried to have the patience to do it, but finally yesterday, I gave up.

Here it is, in all its sad glory. I haven't cut away the remaining fiber yet. But I will.

I wound the other two bobbins onto the plying ball, but not without some problems. The issue, as I discovered, is winding the fiber on wider than the bobbin ends. I did curve it up so that the fiber was within the bobbin end at the end, but was wider in the middle. You can see it here in this photo

See the middle two bobbins on the top? They are fatter in the middle than at the end. What happens is that as you wind off, the fiber slides off the end and becomes tangled. With bobbin #3 (the second one from the right), I caught it relatively quickly and was able to recover with just a couple of broken off ends and some rescue work with an empty bobbin. No fiber went to waste though I had to splice it a few times. Bobbins #1 and 4 - the ones on the ends - had no problems because they were not built up like that.

I also found a really good way to wind off a bobbin, without any sort of extra kate - makeshift or otherwise. I stuck a chopstick through the bobbin and wedged it in the crooks of my knees. Like so.

And so I ended up with two plying balls. One a bit smaller than the other, so there is some Andean plying in my future.

The one on the right was the second one that I finished yesterday. Can't you tell? ;-)

Now I can get started plying and not dread the thought of fixing that messed up bobbin.