(no subject)

The thing about teaching myself to spin from books and articles and the occasional youtube video is that there are probably a lot of small things that, if I were being taught by a person, they would have told me in passing or I would have picked up by watching them. But since I'm teaching myself, some of those things get missed because they aren't the specific subject of those articles or youtube videos. (Also, most spinning books - not all, but most - assume that you might start with a spindle but are inevitably going to "progress" to spinning on a wheel and thus concentrate on teaching you techniques for a wheel. I am entirely uninterested in wheel spinning.)

I mention this because I've recently discovered that I've been doing something the hardest possible way. When you spin, the single-strand yarn that you make is called a singles. You can decide that your singles are finished as they are, or you can make another singles (or several more) and spin them together - that's plying. I had been spinning my singles and winding them into separate balls, then trying to ply them from those two balls. This inevitably led to them getting horribly tangled and me crying and hating the whole plying process.

But! A week or so ago, I stumbled on an old ravelry conversation about making ply balls: once you've spun your two singles (or however many), you take them and wind them together into a ball and then ply from that, from the outside in. This keeps them under tension and doesn't allow them to tangle and makes the plying process so much easier. Plus, you get a preview of how the colors in your singles are going to interact with each other.

And I don't end up crying when I ply anymore, which is a definite positive.