dudleyspinner teaches Create With Unspun Roving It is easy to knit or crochet with unspun roving. The results are well worth the effort. The fabric you will make is very soft and warm. Take a good quality roving that hold together well. My dudleyspinner tie dyed rovings work great. If the roving is space dyed, look it over, decide how you want the color repeats to be placed. If you split the roving many times, the repeat will be shorter, a few times, it will be longer. This is the same principal that applies to spinning. If you see that you have a color repeat that is fairly consistent, or it does not matter, pull the roving apart at the same color. DO NOT CUT IT. Making shorter piece of roving makes it easier to work with. What you will be doing is actually the preparation part of spinning, called drafting. The roving will usually be compacted in the dying process. Roving comes in a large roll, so even if it is not dyed, the pressure of being in a roll will also compact the fiber. Look at the roving carefully, you will notice there are two sides that are almost folded to the center. Carefully pull the roving apart, along the fold, you will be unfolding it, making it about 4 inches wide. After you have pulled apart about a foot of roving, split it in half, lengthwise. You want a long continuous piece of roving. Roll the split portion up gently, don't twist it. Continue until you have completed the section that you have decided you want for your repeat. If you want the repeats to be consistent, when you get to the end of your section, turn the roving around and go back down the roving. overlap a little and draft it out until it is the same diameter and before. You are making a thick yarn! Continue to split the roving until it is about the diameter of a pencil. If you have left it thicker, put your hands about twice the length of an individual fiber, apart . ( This will vary from roving to roving). Gently, stretch the fibers , easing them into a long yarn like piece. If they should come apart, overlap them, fluff the fibers out and gently stretch again. Most of the time I will split a roving into 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8, then 1/6, etc. Each time it is split, gently roll the fiber up, do not twist. If it is important to you, always start at the same end, keeping the repeat in order. When you have split the roving to pencil size, the last time you have split it, go ahead and twist the fiber . This will naturally happen if you roll it into a ball. Knitting or crocheting with unspun roving takes a little care, especially crochet. Be sure to start from the end of the pencil roving that will make each stitch increase the twist. If you are right handed, that will be the opposite end of the ball you just made. The twist will be Z or clockwise, and you want to work from the end that will make your yarn twist more, not untwist. So, rewind your ball, noting that you are having to twist it in the opposite direction, S or counterclockwise. Now you are ready to start your creation. When you are using a space dyed roving the color repeat will be in your control. If the colors are in small sections, changing every few inches, and you split it going down the roving and then coming back up. Which is a palendrome sequence. The color repeat will be very fast. Some one described it as like static or busy. If you leave the roving in a larger width and draft it by pulling, the color repeat will be longer. I first saw this technique in the Fall 2000 Spin Off magazine page 54 the article "A Knitted Mobius Strip Scarf by Rita Buchanan. This is a poncho that I created for my sister using unspun roving. It used about 10 ounces of dudleyspinner roving and about 3 ounces of beads on the edge. |
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