I have come to the part of my homework I dread everytime…. the art yarn section. Every year we are given several art yarns to spin. I think I may have mentioned in the past my dislike of art yarns. I don’t really use them in my knitting. While they are all the rage in spinning, I can never think of something I would actually use it in as a project. Which is part of my hang up. The other issue I have with these yarns is that they are really not easy to make. So not only do I have to make yarn I will most likely never use or make in my daily life, it’s also hard… I know this is not logical. I made cotton yarns, and silk embroidery floss, and linen yarns this year. None of those are likely to be in my normal use for spinning. So my utter frustration and anger towards these exercises is rather childish… I hate it when I feel that way and just can’t seem to get myself to change my mind.
A large part of this is that I have such a hard time executing them. So yesterday after several botched attempts. It really made me mad to realize I took no notes the day we did this in class, so I am relying on a handout and what I remember from spinning the sad skein I did 6 months ago. So I went online to do some research on the forums. Every one was talking about Sarah Anderson’s Book The Spinners Book of Yarn Designs. The yarn I needed to spin is what she refers to as a bubble crepe yarn.
I call my husband… I NEED this book NOW. He asked me if I had checked Scribd for it yet. (for those of you who have not heard of scribd, you should) Anyway, sure enough it was one offered under our membership and he put it in my library! Boy was that book helpful. It has amazing pictures and step by step explanations. Also there was a beginner crepe yarn before you got to the bubble crepe. I thought I should try that first.
How you make the yarn is that you spin two singles “s” which is counter clockwise and then over ply them “z” which is clockwise. Then you make another single “z” and ply that single in the “s” direction with the original 2 ply yarn. It worked!!!
The bubble crepe is different in that you spin a fine single “s” and a fat single “s” as your first two plies.
As you will note, the trick is to allow the fat single to “wrap” the fine single while you ply. Then those two are plied with another fine single that had been spun “z”
These are then plied “s”. In this case the 2 ply is allowed to wrap the fine single causing the yarn to look like brick brack. 
I am still not sure what I would use this yarn for, but I am relatively sure I could probably re create it. Maybe… I actually prefer the original “crepe” version to the “bubble crepe”. to me it would be a more useful yarn. It has the same texture as the cable yarn we made last year.
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