Snail Spirals

It's that time of year again: Sheep-to-Shawl. I don't know if I'm going to be able to get up to Friday Harbor this year for the Fair, but my lovely spinning friends are still letting me help with the shawl anyway. The weaver this year is doing a twill pattern with a painted warp, and using a lovely merino/silk blend. She sent me some of the top they're using for the warp, and I spun it up over the past couple days.



That's 105 grams/3.7 oz of quite fine (40+ wpi) and very slippery singles. The question then arises of how best to get it back to the spinners in Friday Harbor. I obviously don't want to send my Schacht bobbin. I could wind it onto a cardboard toilet paper core with my ballwinder, but it makes me a bit nervous to send these slippery singles through the mail like that. It would probably be fine, but the large amount of yardage means that any collapsing, snagging, squishing, and subsequent tangling would be of epic proportions.

So I used a cardboard spool (sold as a weaving accessory for sectional warping, but equally useful to spinners). This is, hands-down, my favorite method of storing singles, especially for rewinding for plying. It makes a nice neat package, can be wound tightly, and is very stable since the ends are supported. Plying from them goes very smoothly since the singles are wound on in tidy layers. And the spools are cheap.



As you can see, the mostly-full Schacht bobbin easily went onto a cardboard spool. Each spool will easily hold 4 oz; even more, if you mounded it up in the middle.

Plus, a rewound spool of singles is just so beautiful.