Fun with unspun

Knitting with the Silk Garden and the Malabrigo thick-n-thin picqued my interest in underspun yarn. Naturally I dug out the lovely skein of Icelandic Unspun from Priscilla. I wasn't sure what to do with it. I've been wanting more scarves, since I sit at work and freeze day in and day out. But I tried two different patterns, and the yarn told me quite firmly that it was not going to be a scarf. I had often pondered pairing this yarn with my black and grey Araucania, so I swatched with that. I've been looking at twined mittens, so I started plotting a pair of twined mittens with these two yarns, but then I noticed that the Icelandic is Z-spun and the Araucania is S-spun. That's when I decided that this would be the perfect yarn for exploring twined mittens, using both ends of the ball.

 

Turns out it's maybe not the best yarn for twined mittens. Being 'unspun', it's so underspun that the twining process unspins it too much. Every four rows or so, the yarn has lost so much twist that it breaks. Then I straighten out the yarns, give it a little more twist, and spit-splice the strand back together. It's a slow process, but the mittens are turning out very lovely.