Sampling in progress

 I ran out of stuffing in my small yarn-and-wool-scraps-and-trash jar, and while I do have a much larger jar.... somewhere, I don't know precisely where, so the blanket project is on hold. I still have about a pound and a half of corriedale to make a cardi for Little Monster with, so I began sampling yesterday to determine how to make the yarn I have in mind for it.

3 small cops, each wound in a different way

In addition, I sampled 2 different ways to wind the cop on my cross-arm spindle. After reading a discussion that said the downside to cross arm spindles is the slow wind on, I tried 2 faster methods of winding on: the first (top) was to wind in the same 2-up-1-down method used to create the right-most cop, but without being fussy about it and letting it lay where it lay; the second was something I'd seen in a YouTube video. It's hard to describe, but sort of went around and around the edge of the cop. It was the fastest of the 3 methods I tried, but as you can see it creates a sort of messy cop. The method on the top was the messiest and tangled the worst as soon as it was removed from the spindle. The method on the right is the fussiest method in use, but since it creates a very stable cop when removed from the spindle, I effectively only have to wind on once (as opposed to once on and then into another form to get it off the spindle), so I'll keep on with the fussy method because it is saving me time in the long run. It does frustrate me to have to pause and wind on in this really fussy way when I'm in my flow, but for little samples like this that will tangle extremely easily, I'm basically trading one minor annoyance for a potentially big annoyance as I wind it off into an outer-pull ball or something and it tangles.

Anyway, the 3 cops are for a 3 ply yarn. I'm aiming for about heavy-fingering to DK, so we'll see how that goes.