Working With Cascade Magnum
Now that I've reached the end of the Blue superwash fiber I did some digging in my fiber stash, pulling out things I've wanted to get to. One of the things I pulled out is some pencil roving from Cascade Yarns.
I actually bought this the year before I learned to spin. It was on clearance at 60% off. (Yup, totally something I would buy! LOL!!) It's actually a super bulky "yarn" that knits 2 stitches to the inch but Cascade thought they could dual market it as yarn/pencil roving. I don't know that it paid off as they didn't carry it for long. It's 100% Peruvian wool, a medium grade I'd say, although the colors are quite nice. I figured the day had come for me to finally spin some up. It turned out to be not as great as I thought it would be. I suspect (and it was confirmed when I washed the finished skein) that there was something about the dye that either it wasn't rinsed properly or something because there seemed to be a lot of drag on the fiber. True, there was a very slight twist to the roving but it virtually vanished as the fiber was drafted. All I know is it wasn't as easy to spin as the Louet's Northern Lights was, and certainly not as easy as any roving I've bought from Wild Geese. Each skein was 250 gm (8.8 ounces) so I reasonably assumed it would fill two of my regular bobbins slightly past capacity.
All 3 bobbins didn't quite fill one bobbin on my Bea so it's proof I can get more than 8 ounces on one Bea bobbin. It plied very fast and I Navajo 3-plied it. Over all I was very happy with how it turned out. It softened quite nicely after washing and there was some residual dye in it which explained why it didn't draft as smoothly as it should have.
This 250 gm skein came out to 416 yds of chunky weight 3ply yarny goodness.
Imagine my surprise to find this as the outcome! Let me assure you I absolutely stuffed those bobbins until they pretty much wouldn't wind on any more. These are supposed to be 4 ounce capacity bobbins. I decided the only way to solve this was to weigh them. Here's what happened; I weighed an empty bobbin, then weighed each full bobbin and subtracted the empty bobbin weight. I never expected this outcome: the singles on the first bobbin weighed 4.29 ounces and the singles on the second bobbin weighed 3.55 ounces. The third bobbin had slightly over 1 ounce of singles on it. This all raised more questions than it answered! How is it possible for two bobbins with singles made from the same wool at virtually the same gauge, filled to the same capacity have a variance in weight of nearly 3/4 of an ounce???? I realized it has to be voodoo.
All 3 bobbins didn't quite fill one bobbin on my Bea so it's proof I can get more than 8 ounces on one Bea bobbin. It plied very fast and I Navajo 3-plied it. Over all I was very happy with how it turned out. It softened quite nicely after washing and there was some residual dye in it which explained why it didn't draft as smoothly as it should have.
This 250 gm skein came out to 416 yds of chunky weight 3ply yarny goodness.
Posted by Gloria Patre at 8/3/2010 3:29 PM 
Categories: Spinning, Fiber
Tags: cascade magnum super bulky pencil roving
Categories: Spinning, Fiber
Tags: cascade magnum super bulky pencil roving
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