Someone recently asked me a deceptively simple question that I didn't know how to answer at the time: how the heck are you supposed to knit with your handspun singles? Like her, my singles come off the wheel with a huge amount of twist. If they aren't wound directly onto a bobbin, they kink up and cause a huge mess. I didn't understand how you could possibly hope to knit with something like that. The instant you took the skein off the niddy noddy, it would spring into a huge pile of mess.
The answer, once I did some research, was obvious: add less twist.
If you're planning to ply your yarn, you end up adding a lot of extra twist. This counterbalances the opposite twist you add when plying, and your yarn (hopefully) turns out balanced. But if you plan to knit with your singles, you will want to add a lot less twist. Just enough to keep the yarn together, so that it comes off the wheel already balanced.
This post on the Porpoise Fur blog adds a few other things you might want to do to ensure success. First, she recommends that you use at least a medium-staple wool, and that you avoid slippery fibers like soy and silk. This will help your singles hold together better.
And second, she recommends a more vigorous blocking routine to set the twist. Her method results in yarn which is ever-so-slightly felted, just enough to help the fibers stick to each other. (If you have ever wondered why some people are brutal when setting their twist, this is why: a little bit of felting helps hold the yarn together.)
One thing I hadn't appreciated until I saw her post is that knitting with singles is a great way to keep the color integrity of a multicolored yarn. Since you're not plying the strands together, you don't have to worry about mixing up the color progressions. They will always be as pure as they were in the original dyed fiber. Nice!
Image courtesy Flickr/Hedgehog Fibres
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