Yay, it's time to start spinning!

Over the next two weeks find some time to spin two yarns, As It Comes and Flipped. I'll talk about both of them this week, and you can decide when (and if) you want to spin them.

The first yarn is one that I call As It Comes. If you have a better name for this let me know, it seems to make sense only to me.

Grab one of your nests of fiber, split it longways into two strips. Spin each piece on it's own bobbin, starting with the same color, and then ply them together.

This one is just a relaxing spin. It's the way I spin most freqently, I split my braid, spin two singles and ply them. I don't worry about the colors matching up or not. I'm just spinning the fiber as it comes - that's where the name comes from.

Be sure to finish and tag your yarn.

The colors match in some places and not in others, and I quite like it. This yarn is like wearing my favorite baggy linen pants, comfy and suitable for all occasions.

If you are a very consistant spinning (I'm not) your colors may match the whole length of the yarn, and that's ok too.

This yarn is the baseline for our samples, we'll compare the others to this one.

Go, spin a mellow yarn. Are you watching anything good? Or wonderfully bad?

The second yarn is Flipped. Take fiber nest number two, split it in half lengthwise. Spin one piece starting with the color at one end, spin the second piece starting with a different color in the colorway.

What works for me a lot of the time is to flip the second piece of fiber. When you hold the fiber in your hands to divide it, let's call the end you start with the top, and the end you finsh the strip with is the tail. Spin one single starting with the top and one starting with the tail, the second single is flipped color-wise.

If I'm working with a colorway that starts and ends with the same color, I break off the top color of the second strip, and start that single with the second color in the colorway. Sometimes I add the broken off color randomly in between other colors, sometimes I put it in my batt making pile.

Then ply your singles together, finsih and tag them.

What the Flipped style of spining does to your yarn is shift the colors, so they come together in a different pattern than the As It Comes yarn.

Here's a close up of the two yarns side by side. When they are knit, they will look similar, but not quite the same, which I like.

Notice that the Flipped yarn is more speckled, but notice that it also seems a little duller, color-wise than As It Comes yarn. The more frequently different colors touch, the more it turns down the over all color volume.

Next week here on the blog I'm going to talk about how I keep track, when I'm sampling. Office supplies and markers are my special friends.

I'm out and about teaching over the next two weeks. If you see me at the Austin Weaving and Spinning Guild or at Vogue Knitting Live NYC, tell me about your Sample Along.

I'm checking these posts and Instagram for any questions you have, or you can always email me.

Don't forget to tag your yarns #samplealong when you post them on Instagram.