A short piece on plying

The question of plying came up in an online discussion the other day - well, more like the other week - and I had mentioned an experiment I'd done regarding 2- versus 3-ply. Now, it turns out that Ask The Bellwether recently had a much better blog post about this than I can write up - if you are interested in fiber arts and don't read her blog, you really should - but still, a couple of photos I've taken might help further elaborate on what you can expect when plying yarn.

So, thing one. Why ply at all? I can give you all sorts of semi-scientific reasons - balance out your twist, strengthen your yarn, yada yada yada - but really, it's all about your preference. I saw someone at the local weaving guild meeting earlier this week knitting a gorgeous shawl out of unplied ("singles") yarn. So, it really boils down to your own preferences and what you want the yarn for in the first place.

For me, personally, I generally do ply, but sometimes I don't, particularly when I'm after some particular effect in my weaving. I've got some ideas about that I really want to try out in my weaving, but more on that another time. When I do ply my singles, I do either 2- or 3- ply. That is, I twist together either 2 or 3 singles at a time. I prefer 3-ply for its roundness and its technical difficulty - it's just plain harder to get Just Right - but 2-ply is quite nice for knitting or weaving as well.

When I'm spinning just for the fun of it (which is most of the time) I usually spin to about the same twists-per-inch and same thickness. No particular reason why, that's just the most natural thing for me to do. So, with that in mind, it was particularly interesting to see how some of my recent spinning projects turned out. I have a huge amount of natural brown merino (couldn't resist those fleeces!) and so I spun up a big skein of 2-ply, then did it again as 3-ply. The twist is about the same, just because I wasn't trying for anything in particular. The diameter of the singles is also more or less the same. Might have been a bit thicker as I was making up the 2-ply.

Here's the yarn I'm talking about, the 2-ply, the singles, and the 3-ply.


You'll notice the twist on the 3-ply is tighter than the 2-ply. Plying two singles together takes more twist out of the singles than plying three singles together. That means that there is more twist that needs to be balanced when you're doing a 3-ply. So, either spin your singles looser or expect a tighter 3-ply yarn than you'll get out of just a 2-ply!

If you are further interested in this sort of thing, do take a few moments to read the blog post I linked to above. I'll be doing some further experiments over the next few weeks with not just plying, but plying already-plied yarns back on themselves, something known as cabling. Cables are super round yarns and if you can do some crazy things with how the colors blend in a cabled yarn. I have so many ideas for interesting yarns, it's a shame I can't spend more time spinning! Ah well, tomorrow I'll post about what's been distracting me from spinning (and blogging) most recently - my garden!